Until the Day I Die
by Holly Kasakabe
Summary: Holly Kirkland is definitely not normal, but she has all she ever wanted. It's complicated, but she's working it out. Serial killers, cryptic psychologists, and a new boss throw a wrench in her plans, and that's not to mention the mix of teen and adult drama being hurled her way. This might be harder than she thought. Rated M for language, mention of sex, and violent content.
1. Chapter 1

Booth, Brennan, and I were all in Booth's FBI vehicle, a dark SUV. Rain poured down from the grey clouds overhead, finally beginning to ease up, splashing water over the windows and thrumming on the top of the car rhythmically. Lights flashed, red and blue colors from on top of the vehicle reflecting in the droplets on the windshield and shining the glass red, blue, pink, and purple in spots, light distorted and colorful.

Now it was where I spent the majority of my time. Last year, I'd never heard of Special Agent Seeley Booth, and Dr. Temperance Brennan was just the name of an authoress I liked to read.

My name is Holly Elena Emily Anya Kirkland. (Yeah, I know. It takes forever to write.) I'm seventeen years old with a high school diploma, a positive public image to my name, and I can boast the credits of several high-profile, as well as several normal, homicide investigations in the past eight months. Am I a genius prodigy or something? Well, no. Am I extremely lucky in the way everything's played out? Hell yes.

Last November, a man came to my door, asking to see the first decent, non-abusive, non-negligent foster parents I could remember having. Last December, he came back. Last December, my "parents" took off and my brother enlisted in the army without telling me. I learned to live on my own – got my own apartment, got a job at a bar that was willing to overlook my age as a minor because it wasn't a great neighborhood and they needed someone old enough to be able to trust to handle alcohol.

Nine months ago, I got in a fight with a gang member. Eight months ago, I was arrested under charges of homicide of the same person. Two weeks later I was officially proven innocent as another person was arrested and convicted. In those two weeks, my life changed entirely.

Trying to pretend I was normal, I leaped at the opportunity to do what I'd wanted since I was little, but had never thought I'd be able to – solve murders. Of course, this sort of shattered the "normal" image, but I was accepted by Booth, Brennan, Brennan's friends and colleagues Dr. Jack Hodgins and Angela Montenegro, her graduate intern Zachary Addy, and her supervisor Dr. Daniel Goodman.

First I was just tagging along because I was supposedly under threat from the gang whose person was killed. I mean, if the FBI thought I'd killed him, it was reasonable to assume that the gang did, too, and so I was put in Booth's custody for my own protection. Because I was flippant, distant, and altogether rude when I was upset, Booth and I didn't start out on the right notes. I spent more time with Brennan, whom I idolized for her writing and her accomplishments. Think of her as a celebrity and myself as a fan. Then she figured out that our murderer was actually Senator Bethlehem's personal aid, Ken Thompson, who had proceeded to try to light us all on fire when we found him destroying evidence. I shot him in the leg and saved our lives.

Next came the press coverage. My reputation developed. I went from someone no one had heard of to D.C.'s hot new topic. Turned out that for all my faults, the Jeffersonian team _liked_ me, and they invited me back for a terrorist case. And then for the murder staged as suicide of a Venezuelan ambassador's son. And for a child murdered and crushed to death, a deejay found mummified in the wall of a club, the attempt to exonerate a death row killer (who turned out to have killed even more people than he was charged with), sending more people to jail in a court case, an Easter locked in the lab due to valley fever pathogens… et cetera. It continued, on and on, stretching out like a fairytale that didn't have an end in sight.

Then I started getting shot at. The same person took shots at Brennan, then tried to blow up her apartment (though the blow hit Booth instead), and finally, he kidnapped me. An FBI agent who had gone dark side in favor of money from a rich mob family, he was trying to cover his own ass when we started to look into the death of the man he'd killed by creating a conflict of interest in our team. In the ensuing fight, he stabbed me in the stomach, tied me up, hung me from a hook, and prepared to knock me out, kill me, and feed me to feral dogs. Booth had stormed in at the last minute, shot the double-crosser, and saved my life.

When he donated blood for my transfusions, as I'd almost bled to death, the hospital compared our blood samples to make sure that his blood type would be compatible with mine. They didn't want to just give me anyone's blood in case my body rejected it. They authorized it within hours due to the paternal match they'd found. It turned out that Booth was my biological father, and he'd never even known that I existed. We went from operating well to being rocky again as we adjusted to the dramatic change.

While I recovered in the hospital, Angela discovered the closely-kept secret that I illegally lived alone in a bad apartment in a low-class neighborhood. Suddenly I was living with Brennan in her apartment, her roommate for an indefinite time. While I learned to navigate a new relationship with Booth and recovered from the physical and mental trauma of being kidnapped, I kept investigating. Brennan's supervisor, Dr. Goodman, offered me a paid internship. I quit my job at the bar, moved in entirely with Brennan, and started working alongside Zach as the interns. Though I was technically Goodman's, it seemed like Brennan, Angela, and Hodgins shared me due to me not having a specified field of study.

The last case we'd all worked together is what shook things up a month ago. Brennan's mother, who disappeared when she was fifteen, was identified from the Jeffersonian limbo, murdered. In a long story short, we reunited her with her brother, Russ, and discovered that their parents, Christine and Max Brennan, were actually Ruth and Max Keenan, fugitive bank robbers who changed their identity when a heist went horribly wrong. Targeted by a hitman who was later placed in Witness Protection, they ran away and tried to lead the hitman, Vince McVicar, away from their children, Temperance and Russ. McVicar tried to kill Ruth with a bolt stunner, but Max moved her out of the way just in time to keep her skull from being smashed. There had still been damage done, and a subdural hematoma was caused by the blow. The hematoma grew and proved fatal.

Strangely enough, though Russ described McVicar for Angela, our forensic artist, I was the one who recognized him, having seen him far more recently. The man who came to my foster parents' house the year before was Vince McVicar. My foster parents had done something to get him after them and they tried to run away to escape. Aaron, my foster brother, had known who he was but had kept it a secret from me for my own safety. He enlisted not long after. I'd thought he was abandoning me, and maybe he was, but I almost dared to think that maybe he had only left out of fear for his life. It was a founded fear; at McVicar's farm, we found the bodies of my foster parents, both murdered not long after they had disappeared, and their car abandoned on the property.

So, my family was pretty much destroyed by McVicar. That wasn't alright, by any means, but I was, because I had a new family; my father, a four-year-old half-brother, and my team, who was closer to family than mere colleagues.

As Brennan and Russ reconciled, Russ and I became friends. It turned out that we got along. As Russ is on parole for running a chop shop, Booth wasn't all that ecstatic about this, but he got over it quickly.

In light of the truths we'd uncovered, Goodman had graciously given Brennan and I time off. He can be egotistical and sarcastic, but he is a more than fair boss who shows consideration for his employees. He won my favor by his respect for me and my boundaries. After years of being mistreated, I have qualms to being touched. My interactions with the team have helped me to begin getting over that, feeling far more comfortable with children, but I still like to keep my hands to myself most of the time and I don't shake hands with strangers. Goodman let it be even without knowing the context or the reasons, and once he did know, he treated me the same, if he did overly tactfully gloss over it in some instances.

In the past month, a lot had happened. First, Brennan had decided to take a month off to go to visit Russ in North Carolina. She was originally going to Darfur for an anthropology project, but changed her mind. She invited me to go with her. I stayed for about five days, mostly spending time with Russ and Brennan as the adults I was comfortable around. I also met Russ's girlfriend, Amy Hollister, and her kids, sisters Emma and Hayley. The girls liked me well enough, and I babysat while the three went to dinner, but I was ultimately with a family that wasn't my own. Though there were no problems, I still felt like I was intruding, so I came back to D.C. while she stayed there. Amy and Russ told me I was welcome and that was nice of them, but I doubted I'd go there without Brennan anytime soon.

Back in D.C., I strengthened my other bridges. Finally able to safely wear normal clothes (after being stabbed, I'd worn loose, elastic clothes so my abdomen wasn't strained), I let Angela drag me out to the mall and she convinced me to get some new outfits for my limited wardrobe. My typical choice of dress was jeans and a long-sleeved, oversized sweatshirt to cover up my arms and back, where there were marks from fights and abuse. Angela was too considerate to ask me to wear anything that didn't take those into account, and instead of trying to convince me to buy summery clothes, she persuaded me of the merits of long pants that weren't necessarily jeans, colored and designed shirts that were either long-sleeved or could be easily paired with a jacket, and a couple of blazers and sweaters with long sleeves that weren't too heavy to comfortably wear.

I drew the line at acrylic nails. Angela has to realize that I'm not a typical person, and if she wants to "integrate" me into the community of women who like shopping and getting their nails done and looking good without having a court case to go to, then she has to take smaller steps. The makeup shopping was a disaster anyway, and I think that's how she learned this.

Hodgins and Zach had me over a couple of times since they couldn't really see me at work during my leave. Hodgins' family is, according to him, "one of those that secretly run the world." Being the sole heir to a high-profile company called the Cantilever Foundation, along with the biggest donor to the Jeffersonian, Hodgins has me claimed on his insurance, meaning all of my health and wellness bills are covered by Cantilever. Zach, who lives above Hodgins' garage in what is practically its own five-star home, and I began watching _Supernatural,_ and he introduced me to some of his favorites, like _Star Trek_ and _Battlestar Galactica_ (although I suspected the Winchesters were growing on him as well).

I also spent a lot of time with Booth. He made a point of having me over when he had Parker, too. His custody over the boy was split with Rebecca. He and Rebecca hadn't been involved with each other in a long time. It just hadn't worked, whatever the reason, but both of them had wanted to be present in their son's life. Compromising, they parted on amiable terms and remained in fair contact so that they could both be active parents. I met her a couple more times. We didn't really click the way that Russ and I did, but we didn't _not_ get along. I don't think she was very happy about who I was, but she didn't seem to blame myself or Booth for the unexpected situation we found ourselves in. As for Parker? The boy seemed to love me, despite not really knowing who I was. I didn't know if Booth had told him I was his sister or just let him think I was a coworker, but I didn't feel like there had ever been an appropriate time to ask.

When Parker wasn't with us, Booth and I talked more about work, but also a little bit about our lives without getting too into touchy details. I went to his apartment a couple of times when Parker wasn't also there, and though I was obviously told I could come around whenever, I was still tense inside. It wasn't because of Booth, or Parker, or even that it was just an apartment; it was simply because it was a new place and I was still getting used to it. Either way, I was still closer to Booth than I had been to any foster parents I'd been stuck with, even though I lived with Brennan.

The time in which I wasn't with anyone else, I spent on my own. I missed Brennan's company, sure – we got along impressively well, just seeming to click together in spite of our age gap and vastly different personalities – but I had missed living alone, too. Her apartment was much safer and had its own security system and a few guards who, by now, knew me by name and news reputation. She didn't have a TV, but she had given me permission to use her computer, books, and music collection, so I was kept occupied when I was just there.

Angela came over a couple of times. Brennan had given her a key to the apartment long before I joined their group, and the artist liked to check on 'her people.' Aside from Angela and Booth, only one other person had stepped foot in Brennan's apartment while she'd been away; Dr. Daniel Goodman.

Goodman is a former archaeologist who became an administrator at the Jeffersonian. Functioning as the Medico-Legal lab's supervisor and as everyone's boss, there were times when priorities ruffled some feathers, but for the most part he was an amiable man. He was aware of where Brennan was in case he had needed to reach her for work at any time, and he was also aware that I lived with her. While only calling Brennan to keep her in the loop, I was close enough for him to stop by in person to bid goodbye, as he'd opted to take an indefinite sabbatical for personal reasons. We weren't close enough for me to feel like I could ask what those reasons were, but I wished him luck. He passed over some paperwork confirming and validating my position as one of his interns, as the next person to take up the job wouldn't know me and would probably be more skeptical.

Despite all of this and my growing comfort in my new home, I was excited to be back in this situation, with Booth driving, Brennan shotgun, and me in the middle of the backseat, driving towards a crime scene for the first investigation since Brennan's mother was found and McVicar's subsequent arrest.

"What did you do?" Booth asked Brennan interestedly, trying to make conversation. This was the first time he'd seen her in about a month. Sure, we were getting better about learning how to stretch stories out so they took a while, but I wanted to know how she was doing, too. We'd only just picked her up, and she'd just gotten here so there hadn't been much time to talk.

"I read… walked on the beach…" Brennan shrugged before experimentally testing a new term. "I chilled." It sounded like she'd had a relaxing vacation. Good; she deserved it. I got to get back in touch with myself, straightening my own emotions out after making friends with Russ, Amy, and Amy's daughters. She'd been under some more strain, so I was glad she got through it and enjoyed herself.

It only occurred to me when Booth seemed absolutely incredulous that he may not have known that she'd opted to stay in North Carolina past the time when I came back to D.C.. "You chilled. In Darfur." He looked between her and the rain-splattered windshield like he thought she might just be making a joke. "You _chilled…_ in _Darfur."_ If anyone was going to, it would be Brennan.

She shook her head and corrected him. "In North Carolina," she amended. "I changed my vacation plans to spend time with my brother. Russ and I talked about it, and… we really want to find Dad."

Their father, Max Keenan/Brennan, was on the run. Just as we'd wrapped up the case, solving what had happened to both of our families (for the most part), Max had left a recording on Brennan's answering machine, warning his kids to stop looking for him. It had been an ominous message, but of course, it wasn't one that we chose to listen to.

Booth smiled sarcastically and huffed. "Okay, well, just so you know, the FBI is going to find your father, no matter _what_ you want." And he probably felt this needed to be pointed out, because the FBI wanted to arrest Max, not just find him and get answers. A victim of some crimes he may be; he was also a wanted fugitive who had been committing identity fraud since the late seventies.

"My brother and I don't want the FBI to backburner the search," Brennan explained patiently for Booth, smile flickering to life every time she got to call Russ her brother. After having been disconnected since she was fifteen, being able to reunite with him had to be the best part of everything that had happened.

At that moment, Booth chose to make a left turn. The light was still green, but he hadn't slowed down. It was raining, too; although it was beginning to ease up, there was still water pooling and slicking the road, and I could feel as the SUV actually went up onto the left side for several seconds while the remaining tires on the road squealed protestation.

I grabbed onto the door desperately, suddenly wishing that I was the one driving. Upon Booth's insistence, I'd gotten my driver's license during a case we'd taken in California. "Whoa! You have _brakes_ , man, take advantage of them!"

Brennan seemed unshaken at first glance, but I noticed that one of her hands was fisted tightly around the waist strap of her seatbelt. "Is it okay to go over on two wheels like that?" She questioned skeptically.

 _"_ _No!"_ I responded emphatically.

"Only when making sharp turns at high speeds," Booth disagreed tersely. I resisted the urge to bash my head against the window. If he kept driving like this I'd _walk_ to the crime scene. And then go back to taking taxis. "Okay, Bones, why don't you have a little faith in me, okay? I'm not going to backburner the case, alright? I'm going to find your father."

Brennan smirked slightly. "My brother said you'd say that," she informed him proudly.

He looked at her sideways, sparing a second from the road to see her dreamily happy expression. "You really keep saying 'my brother' a lot," he told her in case she hadn't noticed.

Her small smile only grew. She had definitely been aware of it. "Well, I lost Russ for fifteen years. I like the sound of it." She rolled her shoulders, and the anthropologist settled back comfortably against the passenger's seat. "My brother…" she sighed happily.

Booth turned the windshield wipers down so that they weren't moving back and forth at such short intervals. This allowed for more time for the raindrops to splatter on the glass and distort vision, but as they were slowing down, it wasn't as much of a hindrance. Still, a green light turned yellow and Booth sped up noticeably to get through before it turned red.

Brennan turned her head to stare at him. "What's with the siren?" She finally asked. "And why are you driving like a maniac?" She added. _Thank you!_

I laughed. The month-long break had been great, really, and it had given me time to foster relationships without murder and violence, but it was still exhilarating to be back in the game. Catching killers had been a romantic dream when I was a kid; as life worked out and I grew up, it became a fantasy… until it suddenly wasn't. I had never thought I really fit in anywhere before I found a home with the elite scientists of the world-renowned Jeffersonian Institution and a loyal, determined FBI agent.

"Welcome home, Dr. Brennan," I managed to say warmly with a grin.

* * *

The crime scene was suburban, and the scene was worse than I'd thought it would be. A smaller, four-door car was still on fire; the firefighters were working on putting it out as we arrived. Because of all of the emergency vehicles, we had to park further away and walk the rest of the way. A little bit behind the car, upturned and half on the railroad tracks, there was a small train. One of the cars had been overturned and lay on its side to the left of the tracks; the car in front of it was askew on the railroad and those behind it were crunched, glass broken and metal warped.

It was a chillier night, but between the heat from all of the lights, cars, bodies, and fires, it wasn't unbearable, and I was glad I was just wearing a long-sleeved shirt rather than a sweater. One of the things Angela had insisted I try was long-sleeved clothes instead of a jacket all of the time. I wasn't as comfortable with how form-fitting they were compared to my oversized sweatshirts, but I was growing used to them. There were at least two firetrucks that I'd seen, and three times that many ambulances and paramedic teams. The train had held passengers, and while some were undoubtedly dead, there were others that had survived. The people in the car were all most certainly dead; if the train crash hadn't done it, then the fire that was still blazing certainly had.

Booth and I had Brennan between us, and I looked around, seeing where people were so that I could avoid bumping into them. Booth seemed slightly saddened by the scene, which was much worse than most of the crime scenes we'd visited. "Got passenger cars on the tracks, one on the side. There's gonna be fatalities." He sighed softly when he saw the black coroner's van, only attesting to his claim.

"Someone just stopped their car on the railroad tracks?" Although when the car and train collided, both had been shoved out of position, that seemed to be how the crash had started out. "What is this, _Final Destination?_ "

"Stan! I need some gauze!" Instead of answering me, Booth looked around when he heard the female voice shouting for someone else. Guessing that he recognized it, I followed where he was looking and saw a woman coming out from by the horribly damaged car, holding an arm that was cut off just above the elbow. Well, less like cut and more like blown in the aftermath of impact or small explosion.

I blinked, unsure whether that was cool or horrible.

She lifted the arm in front of her and set the watch on the band around its wrist. "Danny, if you don't find the owner of this in the next ten minutes, he'll bleed to death, starting… now!" Well, that was resourceful. I couldn't help but feel it was a tad insensitive, even if it was funny, and that was coming from me.

In short, she was an African American woman clad in black slacks and a black leather jacket zipped up over her torso, long, ebony hair similar to mine thrown up in a slightly messy ponytail. Short locks on either side fell past her ears and framed her face. A couple inches shorter than Brennan but almost my exact height, as she wasn't wearing heels on her shoes, and her earrings were simple small silver hoops. I thought it might just be the lighting until an ambulance light flashed over her face when she looked up and I realized that, yes, she was wearing red lipstick at a crime scene.

I thought I kinda liked her, actually.

She smiled at Booth as she hiked up from the wrecked car towards us, holding the arm at her side casually in the same way that someone would carry some water or a handbag. "Seeley," she greeted with a smile and a dip of her head.

I looked up at Booth to see how he'd react to her. Generally when meeting new people, I take my cues from my friends that already know them; I trust their judgment. However, I learned the hard way that while taking their judgment as an impression is alright, it's best to form my own opinion over them, as the last time I took my safety with one of Booth's friends for granted, it got me temporarily handicapped and very nearly murdered.

"Camille," he said with a smile. I thought they looked like old friends meeting up again.

She cocked her head and narrowed her brown eyes playfully. "Don't call me Camille."

"Don't call me Seeley," he shot back with a practiced comfort. He gestured to Brennan, and then to myself on her other side. "Miss Kirkland, Dr. Brennan, Dr. Saroyan." Usually he called me either by my name or by 'kid.' It used to irritate me, but I realized he actually meant it as an endearment, like you'd call a little kid 'honey' or 'sweetie.' He was just taking my age and personality into consideration and being more appropriate to boundaries. Likewise, Brennan had her own nickname – but when Booth introduced us to other people professionally, he used our surnames to show respect. "You know each other, right?"

Brennan and I both looked at Dr. Saroyan, and she looked over the two of us, and then Brennan and I looked to each other.

"No," Brennan told Booth in no uncertain terms.

"No," Saroyan seconded.

"Not at all," I said, completing the triad.

Booth's face fell. He looked as almost-frightened as he did when he'd introduced me to Caroline Julian, a prosecutor who defended my case when I was a murder suspect in New Orleans after being attacked and traumatized into amnesia. She had been sassy and full of attitude; I'd liked it, and though we went back and forth, no harm was done.

"Uh-oh," he sighed, taking a small step back.

Saroyan smiled politely to Brennan and I. I appreciated that at least she was being respectful, but then she started to talk again. "Miss Kirkland, I want you helping the paramedics. People are hurt, others are dead. Either way, we need all of the bodies off the scene." I raised my eyebrows. She wanted me to what now? I know emergency first aid; I kind of had to learn it, what with living on my own and working in a situation where anyone could get seriously hurt without warning. That doesn't mean she gets to pawn me out to be a medic when I'm here to do my job. "Dr. Brennan, I'd like you to check out the automobile this train hit. It's probably what caused the derailment."

Now, telling me to go do something else was one thing; telling both of us was another. I started to smirk when Brennan eyed her but didn't move, and I crossed my arms over my chest, planting my feet firmly to the ground.

"Accidental?" Booth asked Saroyan when no one started committing homicide.

Saroyan pursed her lips unhappily. "N.T.S.B. guy says the train struck the car at least two hundred yards from the nearest access."

Booth looked down, understandably upset. "Deliberate."

Saroyan checked the watch on the half of the arm again and turned to shout over her shoulder at a group of firefighters by one of the train cars. "Eight minutes, Steve!" Looking back in front of her to Booth, she added, "Probably suicide." Then she turned her attention back to Brennan and I, neither of whom were inclined to follow her orders. She watched us sternly. "I've given you jobs. Why are you still here?"

 _The nerve!_

"I'm not a paramedic." I stated factually.

"And I'm not a coroner." Brennan told Saroyan, just in case the woman didn't quite understand what our functions were.

And, finally, I had to add in an important detail that she needed to know. "And we don't work for you."

She half-smiled. "Well. You got part of it right." Shrugging her shoulders, her hair swishing over the smooth leather of her jacket, she judged, "I'd have to give you a "D"-plus for effort."

 _On what counts, exactly, were we wrong?_ "Excuse me?" I asked, cold and testy and just daring her to order me to go off and be a paramedic again.

Before she could reply to me, however, we were interrupted by a man shouting back from the group of firefighters. Three of them were hurriedly pushing up the small slope of a hill to get to another ambulance, a gurney stretched out between them and a man lying half-conscious on it. He was missing an arm. "Got him, Cam! Still breathing!"

"Thanks, Steve!" Saroyan stepped a little bit away from us so that she could intercept the firefighters, and she gently set the bloody arm beside its owner. I figured that if anything was going to make the man flip out, then that would be it, but he seemed to barely register anything, probably too shocked. "Every survivor is one less person for me to autopsy." Turning back around, she winked at Booth. "You look good out of your suit, Seeley. But then, you always did."

"Uh…" _Wrong! Not okay on so many levels!_ I protested loudly in my head, even as Saroyan turned her back on us and let us leave, even though Brennan and I were still exactly where we'd been two minutes ago. Booth shuffled his feet to face her retreating back and raised an arm after her.

"Yeah, that's…" she was already focusing on something else, talking to another person. I had to admit, she did know how to take control of a situation; that didn't mean I approved of her trying to take control of _me._ "Great to have you back in D.C., Camille," he halfheartedly called after her, unsure whether or not she'd be able to hear over the emergency clamor.

Without a certain newcomer here that she needed to be unimpressed by, Brennan looked up at Booth and uncrossed her arms, preparing to go to the car. It wasn't that she hadn't wanted to go look at the inside of the car – it was that she hadn't wanted to be _ordered_ to. "One minute she's holding a severed arm; the next, she's hitting on you."

I stuck my tongue out and shook my head. I happily teased Booth about his girlfriend, Tessa, when they were still together; but in all honesty I'd kind of liked her, even though she had bothered me when I was high. But, then again, I _had_ been high, so I'd also been hyper and oversensitive to stimulus. I hadn't been using drugs, but Brennan, Angela, and I had all gotten sky high when a bunch of methamphetamine was released as a wall in a club broke.

Still, someone hitting on Booth, who was both my father and the figuratively strongest male figure in my life, was not cool.

Booth chuckled and wrote it off. "No, she wasn't hitting on me." That was what it had seemed like, but to be fair, it could have been an inside joke if they'd known each other beforehand. "And you know what? She _is_ your boss. Both of you, she's your new boss."

My legs were moving to follow Brennan down to the overturned car, but my mind was elsewhere. I was actually a little bit horrified. " _She's_ replacing Dr. Goodman?" I exclaimed, looking up to Booth and hoping he was just kidding. He shrugged slightly in response and I groaned. "She just ordered me to go be a paramedic!"

Booth shrugged again and tried to defend Saroyan. "Well, you know, it's not like you don't know how to help."

"There are over half a dozen ambulances here, right now, filled with professionals." I pointed up to the flat land above the slope where the emergency vehicles were parked, even as I stopped walking without thinking so I wouldn't run into Brennan, who had paused. "They do their job; I do mine. Dr. Saroyan does hers and stops ordering me around."

Okay, so it's not like I would particularly _mind_ if I was supposed to help the paramedics. I know a lot of people are hurt and they need help as fast as they can get it. I may not be able to give them blood transfusions, or shots or IVs, but I _do_ know to get compresses on injuries, draw heat out of burns, how to reset dislocations and make splints for breaks – and I have practice, however little I like to remember, with shifting rubble to make safe paths out. So if I came across someone hurt, I wouldn't just walk by.

In fact, if Booth or Brennan had asked me to do it, I probably would. I'm not opposed to helping paramedics; I'm opposed to following orders to do something she doesn't really have a right to tell me to do. She doesn't know me and I don't have qualifications of a medic, so she has no ground other than being my new boss to tell me to do that. The whole thing revolved around the principle and the way she'd demanded and just assumed I'd follow through. If she'd have just asked politely, I probably wouldn't have been so irritated.

Brennan looked over the car as the firefighters extinguished the last of the flames. "May I approach?" She called across the vehicle to an African American man with soot on his face and a thick fireproof suit.

He nodded and stepped away from the car. The last of the smoke wisps were curling up into the dark. "All yours, Dr. Brandon."

" _Brennan,"_ she corrected clearly and loudly across to the firefighter who looked oddly familiar. She stepped over a hole in the ground to reach the upturned passenger's side of the destroyed car. "Dr. _Brennan."_

Suddenly the firefighter wasn't feeling too polite anymore. "You wanna guess my name?" He asked, flatly unamused.

Brennan leaned in through the window and responded without pulling out to face him. "No, but there are thousands of you in D.C. and only one of me." I shut my eyes and sighed. I understand her reasoning; but one thing she's never really been able to master is social etiquette, and though I think parts of necessary social interactions are irritating, I realize that we can't actually dismiss all of the niceties and boundaries.

So I tried to mend the bridge. "Um…" I racked my brain trying to remember where I'd seen the guy before. I scarcely talked to firefighters, but I usually ended up hearing Booth conversing with them at some point. "Nelson, right?" I asked, while Brennan shone a light from a little pen flashlight over the body in the car. "Weren't you there when the SUV was crashed into a tree and torched?"

Paulina Semov and her son, Donovan Decker, had been attacked by mercenaries when his father, Carl Decker, had been set to testify against a company who had knowingly sent defective armor to American troops overseas. To try stopping him from testifying, the mercenaries had tortured the mother, kidnapped the son, and torched the van. We'd gotten the boy back, like I'd promised his father, and though he was traumatized, he was now safe with his dad.

The firefighter nodded. "I'd say it's nice to see you again, but, well." He glanced down at Brennan meaningfully. I felt a bit bad for understanding that sentiment, too.

Still, I shrugged. "Fair enough."

"You know, while you were away, Goodman decided that there should be a head of forensics at the Jeffersonian." Booth stepped to the car at an angle so he didn't slide on the mud from where water had been sprayed to put out the fire. Now he liked to keep track of the general goings-on of the Medico-Legal lab, which was a huge change from when we'd met and he'd just wanted to get out of the place. "It never occurred to you to check in, huh?"

As I got close enough on the other side of the car to look through the shattered window, I saw Brennan shining her little flashlight on the phalanges of the victim in the driver's seat. There wasn't anyone in the passenger's, but there was a hell of a lot of shattered glass in the chair. I wasn't about to be sitting down there, that's for sure. The frame around the top of the window was dented and bent out of shape. The car was unsalvageable. So was the person – seeing as how their skull was missing.

She lowered her light down the hand and to the point where the radius and ulna met the metacarpals. There was a little metal band of silver, like a bracelet, which had been mostly destroyed in the fire, and it looked like part of it had melted into the remaining flesh on the corpse's wrist. "Why didn't Goodman hire me?"

"Oh, my guess?" Booth leaned against the side of the car. "People skills." It was the one area that Brennan's didn't exactly excel in – if it weren't for the interpersonal interactions required for a job like the head of a division, Brennan would be a perfect candidate: renowned, overly qualified, determined yet rational, and extremely intelligent – enough so to pick up any skill she needed. Except, it seems, for interacting with other living beings.

"I have people skills," she objected while she lit up the body, looking over it for anything important of note.

Booth scoffed. He obviously didn't buy it. Just to prove his point, he pointed off where the firefighter had been standing. "Oh, alright. That firefighter's name is Nelson. And it's at _least_ the fourth time you've met him. Odds are," he continued. "Cam knows his kids' names after meeting him _once._ "

That he called her Cam instead of Saroyan shouldn't have bothered me. I'd realized they'd known each other beforehand, but it still seemed like a friendly notion that I wasn't sure I was all behind.

"Dr. Saroyan will have to coordinate with other organizations and departments," I told Brennan across the driver's and passenger's seats of the vehicle. "Sociability is important, much as I dislike that fact. The things she has to remember are things you wouldn't find necessary or practical."

Brennan frowned as she thought about it, but she continued her on-scene examination. "A lot of jewelry," she noted. There was a lot of silver and gold on the body. "Male. Thigh bones suggest he was tall… I.D. bracelet. It's good quality gold, though slightly melted. Too melted for a regular car fire." _Even one hit by a train?_ If the fire burned hotter, then maybe there had been added accelerant, which made this less of an accident. "Do you see a skull?" She asked, turning her head to the side to Booth.

Shaking his head, the agent protested, "Bones, I'm not _looking_ for a skull!"

I sighed and predicted what I'd be asked to do next. "On it." I left the passenger's side window and moved back to try to see through into the backseat.

"Burn damage to the body is more intense than I'd expect from a car fire, even if the fuel tank ruptured and was absolutely full at the time of impact." I pulled open the back door. Some smoke puffed out. I leaned back, squinting my eyes and covering my mouth and nose with a hand. I could see the removed head down on the floor in front of the seats.

"Do you see _anything_ on this car that _isn't_ ruptured?" Booth asked her with a roll of his eyes.

"Found it," I grumbled loud enough for Brennan to hear.

"Booth!" Saroyan was shouting again, and she was going in the opposite direction she'd left to, on her way to another paramedic's ambulance. She was stripping gloves off of her hands and waved an arm to flag Booth's attention. "Three deaths in the first class car!"

Booth brightened and rubbed his palms together, deceptively cheerful. "Oh, homicide! That makes it my case!"

"One of them's a senator," Saroyan added before she was out of earshot. I was sure she'd let Booth get excited first on purpose. His shoulders fell.

"Oh…" I sighed deeply. "Bureaucracy." The political cases were interesting, but they were also more stressful.

Brennan looked up from the corpse and after Booth. "That makes a difference?"

"Facts of life, Bones," he responded with a slight shake of his head, as if he was about to give up trying to explain this to her. Crossing his arms, he turned his back to the car and started to head up after Saroyan.

I looked over the top of the car to the anthropologist, since Booth hadn't edified the situation for her before leaving. "It means there's going to be political and governmental red tape," I offered. She made a face as she understood. Politics didn't often work in our favor. I looked after him and smirked. "Either the barbeque got to him or he's trying to run away before someone gets photographic evidence he's on the case."

* * *

My first time back at the Jeffersonian for work got me welcomed back. I'm not a typical person in many ways; one of those it that I don't really like to be touched. I'm not as bothered by it as I used to be, but I usually only make the exception for children and for comforting adults when _I_ instigate it. Everyone at the lab figured this out very quickly, and they adapted without complaint. Angela repressed most of the urges she got to hug me; instead of high-fives and arm punching, Hodgins took more verbal shots. Brennan and Zach were tactile at times, but neither of them were as much for touching as any of the others, so it was a small adjustment.

I'd grown to miss the people I considered my new family, so being back in a positive, safe atmosphere with them made me feel better than I had in a long time. Although I'd never said this out loud, there had been several times when I'd likened the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal team to a family of sorts. If Booth was my father (which he actually was, so this worked nicely), then Brennan was like my mother or older sister. Angela was the artsy and emotional aunt, Hodgins was the bright yet paranoid uncle, and Zach was the awkward older brother. Regardless of the metaphor, I cared for them more than I had any of my previous families, and because I was used to them being standards, the team is my new family, whether they know it or not.

So I was very pleased to stand next to Angela behind Hodgins' chair at his computer desk on the platform while we all pretended to be looking at the monitor and instead watched Booth and Saroyan talking by the hallway. If Saroyan called us on it, we'd be busted – I learned the hard way that Angela is a passable liar, probably not well enough to fool someone like Saroyan, and Hodgins is absolutely terrible at making up lies on the spot – but I didn't feel like it was very necessary to appease her anyway.

"Apparently, Cam is autopsying a senator." Angela told Hodgins with a glance down at him to see how excited this made him. Hodgins loved the political cases. _Cam, huh?_ Even though I hadn't been here, Saroyan sure had. And Angela, Hodgins, and Zach seemed to like her.

"A senator?" Hodgins looked over his shoulder at Angela, eyes wide and filled with delight. "Oh, we're moving up in the world!"

I crossed my arms and watched Saroyan and Booth talking. They were quiet; Booth was facing away from the lab while Saroyan was. She intended to come up here when they were done conversing, and he'd probably follow her because there's not much he can do in a Medico-Legal lab when everyone else is on the platform.

"Guess I chose a good time to come back to work, then." I was starting to wish I'd come back sooner and been involved when Saroyan started to make her impressions. I felt like I came home to find the couch pushed across the room and the cable plan changed. I had needed the time off to come to grips with not only finding my foster parents dead, but to also really process and move past everything else that's happened since I started working here. Booth had even not-so-subtly told me that he knew a few good therapists in the FBI, but I'd told him in no uncertain terms that talking to another person about an ordeal they hadn't been through would do me no good.

"Yeah, we were starting to think you were ditching!" Hodgins complained as he spun the chair so he could look at me, too. He knew as well as anyone else that I wasn't ditching; at least, not for another several months, considering that was how long my internship lasted. "It's great to have you back in the lair, Xena." He used to call me 'kid,' but when I got in a fight with a Venezuelan ambassador's employee after he broke into a crime scene, Hodgins had compared my minor injuries to the other man's and has since called me the name of Lucy Lawless' famous counterpart. "Who's going to translate scientist-speak to Booth-speak if you're not here?"

To anyone who hadn't been present for the last several months, that would have sounded insulting to Booth. I just smiled, though, because I'd been serving as Booth's phrasebook from science to commonly-understood English ever since I met him. "Definitely not Zach," I joked. Zach, while incredibly smart, had yet to master socializing, and he didn't usually think to dumb things down or use laymen's terms.

Hodgins smiled back at me for the joke. He and I had never _not_ gotten along; at first he liked me because I would take shots at the government. Although I believed our system works, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist like he is, I was aggravated enough to make the jabs at Booth. When I stopped, we still got along because of our snarky attitudes and mischievous personalities. When I'd been kidnapped and stabbed, Hodgins had claimed me on his family's insurance. Seeing as how his family runs the Cantilever Foundation, it means that for as long as he's my sponsor, my health-related bills are all taken care of.

"They have a past," Angela noted out loud, nodding towards Saroyan and Booth so we'd know that she was still focused on them.

Hodgins kind of missed it. "Cam and the senator?"

Angela rolled her eyes and looked down at him to emphatically correct, "Cam and _Booth."_ To reinforce the point, she gestured across the room. "Look how she touches his arm when he laughs!"

Blinking, Hodgins looked back up to her. "You touch my arm when I laugh," he pointed out, and I scoffed, because no, that's not what happens.

"No, no," she corrected with a loud sigh. " _You_ touch _me._ " Hodgins lowered his eyes back to the computer sheepishly. Booth and Saroyan were both moving, Booth coming towards us on the platform where Zach and Brennan were looking over the skeleton and making a first report on its state. Saroyan, surprisingly, was out of sight, making a different stop. "It's a big difference."

I laughed at Hodgins' speechless and a little bit embarrassed expense. The security system by the stairs to the platform beeped and flashed a green light as it processed Booth's access card and allowed her entry without setting off the alarms.

"Okay, what have we got?" He asked, clapping his hands together and meaning business. Angela and I turned around and stepped away from Hodgins as the entomologist turned his chair around, and we all went back into our work modes.

"Male. Forties. Approximately… six foot seven, right-handed." Zach supplied, answering Booth quickly. In the beginning, Zach had wanted to bond with Booth so that he had more male friends – preferably some that wouldn't tease him as much as Hodgins does. However, Booth doesn't like Zach as much as Hodgins or I, so he tried to convince him that normally, guys totally ignore each other out of _friendship._ Zach, the poor boy, actually bought it for a while. Zach still respects Booth, but he's since then given up on getting much more than a working relationship.

"Six foot seven?!" Amazed, Booth tried to pull a moveable computer screen to face him just to verify. Unfortunately for him, Brennan is kind of picky about her equipment, so she glared at him in warning and fixed it.

"I know, right?" It seemed unreal that someone could be that tall… but then you Googled it, and the giant from _The Princess Bride_ was seven foot four. "The guy was practically Jared Padalecki!" Padalecki is an actor in the show Zach and I have been watching. His height gets him teased by his colleagues and by his on-screen brother.

Zach nodded slightly in his agreement, where I don't think anyone else understood the reference. Brennan continued to speak, her fingers gently brushing over the humorous bone. "Athlete in his youth, worn shoulders from repetitive motion…"

"Baseball pitcher, maybe," Booth suggested helpfully. He and Zach where the sports fans; Goodman had liked basketball, too, but he was on sabbatical and therefore temporarily excluded. (Sorry, Goodman.)

Brennan shook her head. "More like a…" Lost for words to describe it, she spread her fingers and opened her palm, raising her hand over head like a basketball pose.

"Basketball," Booth, Zach, and I all said in synchrony, which would really never stop being weird.

Angela looked down at the long skeleton on the backlit examination table and seemed to be envisioning what he'd looked like as a person, with sinew and muscle attached to the bones and covered in taut flesh. That was her gift, why she was so good at forensic artistry and reconstruction; where Brennan, Zach, and I usually just saw bones, and facts, Angela could look at a skeleton and some basic information, and she could see an actual person. I still wasn't sure whether that made her job easier or harder.

"At six foot seven, it makes sense," she decided.

"Every bone in his body is broken," Zach said, shaking his head in what seemed uneasily close to awe. There were a lot of bones in the human body and they took force to break. Breaking all of them took time and effort… unless you're a huge _train,_ in which case it's like a cinderblock being dropped on a little toy car. And not every bone was broken, for that matter; just most of them.

Hodgins slowly turned his head to stare at Zach flatly. "Dude. He got _hit_ by a _train."_

"Cinderblock on a toy car," I agreed aloud, using the simile I'd come up with in my mind to get the point across. Sometimes Zach needed a little bit of nudging to grasp a not strictly intellectual point.

Zach still seemed a bit amazed. Hodgins rolled his eyes, however affectionately, at his friend and stepped away from the table and back to the monitor he'd heartlessly abandoned when Booth had jumped up onto the platform. He zoomed in on the image he'd scanned in of the silver bracelet that had been peeled from the twisted, melted flesh that had remained on the corpse's wrist. It had been engraved, but most of it had melted into indecipherable twists of metal.

"W-A-R…" Hodgins said out loud with audible frustration that it wasn't an easy answer. "It's all I can make out of one name. And then there's "love, Brianna."" _So… an I.D. bracelet?_ I thought. _Given who he'd be on a first-name basis with, it could be a romantic partner, a sister, an aunt…_ While I was debating over whether or not "love" was the right greeting an uninvolved friend could use, Hodgins seemed to realize something. " _Dude!"_

"You're saying 'dude' way too much," Zach voiced, sounding honestly concerned for Hodgins' evidently declining vocabulary banks.

Hodgins ignored Zach's notion. "Forties. Six foot seven. W-A-R. Brianna?" While Hodgins looked down to the corpse, awed, Brennan looked towards me to see if I'd gotten anything out of the disjointed words. I shook my head. The entomologist seemed bothered that no one else got it. "This is Warren Lynch!"

There was a beat of silence, and then four of us spoke at once.

"Uh-oh," I sighed, at the same time as Brennan and Zach both asked, "Who's Warren Lynch?" and Booth's eyes went wide. "No way."

"Wait." Angela shifted her sketchpad to hold it underneath one arm. "Warren Lynch, as in _Lynchpin International_ 's Warren Lynch?" A big name and an even bigger figure in the business world, on our exam table? Fantastic. I can practically _see_ the problems cropping up in the near future from this.

Hodgins bobbed his head enthusiastically up and down.

"I am _not_ telling the press that Warren Lynch killed Senator Paula Davis until we're completely certain," Saroyan warned as she climbed up the stairs, sliding her card through the security system for access. She pushed the lanyard back down, hanging evenly over her neck. Her hair was pulled back in a neat, straight ponytail, and she was still wearing a coat like she'd just finished the autopsy.

The confirmed identity of the politician made me pause. Senator Davis had been well-loved. People had voted for her because of what she stood for and her earnest yet determined personality. She was a nice person according to people who had met her. She was unbiased against any minority groups and she was well-educated. Warren Lynch, on the other hand, was more like a shark. Plenty of people would be sad, but most of them because of the money they'd lost on his stocks.

Even Brennan was surprised by the identity, and visibly bothered by it. She stood up straight from Lynch's body. "I know Senator Davis," she used the wrong tenses without thinking about it, and she rolled her shoulders uneasily. "I signed a book for her to give to her daughter."

Angela let out a long, slow breath. "Man, I love Paula Davis. She could have been president."

"Warren Lynch and Senator Davis killed in one accident?" Hodgins' eyes were almost sparkling, and I swear he was vibrating with energy. He has a weird love for the cases that raise questions concerning the government. He looked at Saroyan pleadingly. "No way it's a coincidence!"

I rolled my eyes. "Wow, Hodgins, I'm amazed you've lasted this long without saying "conspiracy."" I half expected him to explode with it at any moment now, despite just how well things have gone in the past when he was right about having conspiracies. I mean, I was nearly killed, then we found out the dark secrets of a tour group from Iraq. Sooner or later he has to learn that conspiracies aren't actually _good,_ right?

"Hey, Hodgepodge, all engines reverse." Saroyan pointed at Hodgins, mockingly stern. " _First_ we identify beyond a shadow of a doubt, and _then_ we get paranoid."

Hodgins shrugged and glanced back at me, grinning brightly. Evidently Booth wasn't the only person who liked Saroyan, and it was starting to get irritating. "Cool," he said, chilling out but still smirking. "As long as paranoia's on the schedule somewhere."

"If it wasn't, I'm sure you'd sneak it in somewhere anyway," I assured him, knowing him far too well to think he'd just accept it if it weren't. When he wants to do something, he usually does it – we even went behind Goodman's back once to do an experiment, mostly for the sake of having fun doing an awesome experiment. The helpful results were just sort of a plus.

"It… wasn't suicide," Brennan said as Saroyan looked to her, silently prompting an explanation. Hodgins and Angela were both quieted down to the listen, and Booth seemed to be content watching and listening to get his information.

Zach pointed down to Lynch's shoulder and the upper arm. "The jagged edges to the breaks and small fragments… there's a lack of circular or radiating fractures or adherent spurs."

Saroyan frowned and blinked at them almost impatiently. "What does that mean?" I thought maybe she was testing them, but she seemed sincerely wanting of an explanation.

Brennan set her glove-covered hand over a bone in the corpse's body to make a point. "This man was dead for several hours _before_ the train hit him."


	2. The Titan on the Tracks, Part Two

Cam made us all meet up in the loft, which only turned me off that much more. The loft is this safe space that I'd found not long after I'd been shoved into this life. While I accepted and loved it, the Jeffersonian's loft became a safe, quiet space that I could go to when I needed to take a nap after a restless night, or when I needed to regroup, and the only people who would find me were the people who knew where I liked to be – the people whom I actually _wanted_ to know where I was. It felt like Cam was stepping on my heels by turning it from a solitary and calm area to a general meeting place for everyone – including herself.

Hodgins, Zach, and I had claimed one of the couches. I was drinking some water from the vending machines after taking my time settling down for Cam, and the boys had motioned me over. We made an odd trio – my oddities, Hodgins' idiosyncrasies, and Zach's social aptitude (or lack thereof) made for a strange group that maybe shouldn't work together, but during my break while Brennan was in North Carolina, the two had been more than hospitable hosts.

I spent almost as many nights on Hodgins' estate as I had with Booth at his apartment. That wasn't to say there had been many at either, considering that I just felt safest at Brennan's, in the place I'd grown used to, but I still had fun with them. While Booth was my father, I also trusted Hodgins and Zach, and as a bonus, Hodgins' estate was so large that I had gotten to sleep in my own wing of the house – which meant that I didn't feel crowded or cramped at all, and I had had plenty of room and time to look around and explore.

Cam wasn't that close to anyone else, which made me feel just a bit better… considering that I, the person who is most against physical contact, is physically closer to my friends than she is gave me some measure of satisfaction.

"We are tighter than a nun's knees on this one." She looked around warningly; her eyes settled on Hodgins for one minute and then me for another. Conspiracy theorist and teenager? Well, yeah, okay, I suppose that would be reasonable enough. Still, that didn't mean I liked it. "No press, no conjecture with anyone outside this room."

"And Booth," I added, cocking my head but not otherwise changing my attitude or posture. This was only really ours because of our ties with the bureau through Booth. And he was my father, regardless of whether or not Cam knew that, and being told to keep secrets from him? Didn't go over well.

Cam just dipped her head in calm acquiescence. "And Booth," she repeated in agreement.

"Why?" Zach asked, contesting the original command.

"Because we are going to find the details of Senator Davis's death without giving Oliver Stone or Michael Moore any more ideas." She replied to Zach with a straight face and no hesitation. I bit down lightly on my lip. _Making references is Booth's thing._

Brennan scoffed, sitting on a chair and leaning forward with her elbows bent over her knees. "Are we assuming Senator Davis's death was a _coincidence?"_

Cam must have thought that Brennan was just being difficult. With a little bit of exasperation, she quickly explained her logic. "You want to kill someone, planting yourself in front of a train? Probably _not_ the best idea."

"Except how could he have put himself on the tracks if Lynch was already dead himself?" I challenged openly, looking up to Cam and begging a response. Her theory worked if the man had been alive at the time, but what the hell were the odds that he had died right as his car was on railroads? That almost screamed that someone else had been involved. Besides, it's not like he thought killing himself beforehand would make him any more or less dead than waiting to be pulverized when the train hit.

Hodgins, on the other side of Zach, looked up at Angela and the two exchanged a look caught somewhere between amused and concerned. Cam met my eyes, and again, I didn't back down. I didn't care _what_ she saw; my home, my rules, my territory, and I am going to defend my territory. Just because I'd let other animals onto my land doesn't mean I'm going to sit back while they claim it.

Cam finally sighed. I don't know what she'd been looking for or what she finally saw, but she let it go. "Alright, point made. It's too early to make any assumptions." She started to sit up straight again, preparing to stand up, but not before casting a warning look over us all. "I am a diuretic seagull, people. Everything goes through me." I grimaced. I had to hand it to her; she definitely got her message across. "Ten A.M., here, tomorrow." _Goodman never gave us a strict time,_ I thought with growing disinterest. "Zacharoni, your turn to bring the doughnuts."

 _What else did I miss?_ I thought unhappily, but I tried to stop myself from frowning before Zach noticed. He was smiling. He may not be that in tune with other people – and really, when I think back to when we met, I quickly figured that the reason I liked him so well even to begin with wasn't because he had tact, it was because he was just oblivious to my cues of unease or upset – but he would definitely notice and be concerned, and if he was enjoying the new boss, then unless she made his life more difficult, I wanted to let him keep that delight.

I stood up after looking skeptically back at Cam, who was busy exchanging some conversation with Angela, and then turned my back to her and followed after Zach. I nearly reached out for his shoulder – a testament to how comfortable and safe I feel with these people – but although I truly am getting much more relaxed about contact, the only people I'm pushing myself to make exceptions for are children; my little brother, Parker, and Russ's girlfriend's daughters. Everyone else can just deal with it; if they're old enough to understand why, then they're old enough to respect it. Or at least suck it up and live with disappointment. Anyway, I stopped myself and instead just talked, because that usually works just as well.

"Why did she just call you _Zacharoni?_ "

Zach looked over his shoulder for a second but chose to keep his eyes ahead of him, seeing as we were on a catwalk. Zach isn't clumsy, but in spite of being a genius, he's too terrified of automobile crashes to learn to drive on his own, so I just snicker when someone else pokes fun at his nervousness and leave him alone otherwise.

"Cam noticed that I eat macaroni and cheese every day for lunch," he answered.

"Oh." I couldn't help but sound affronted. I'd noticed, but it had taken me a while. Regardless of the fact that it was because for a long time I'd tried very hard to keep myself from bonding with them, convinced that I wouldn't be allowed to keep the relationships, it still irked me that Cam had caught on so quickly. "Yum," I added, however despondent, so that Zach wouldn't worry about me. Which, sadly, still felt like an odd thing to take into consideration… other people worrying about me.

* * *

After an incident where Brennan and I had been attacked by a voodoo priest and both of us given amnesia, Hodgins had gifted me with a new, updated touch screen Smartphone so that I could communicate with them without relying on my surroundings to do so. I also suspected it had something to do with the built-in G.P.S. tracker, especially after the ordeal with Jamie Kenton trying to slaughter me horrifically, but that wasn't actually something I was willing to argue with. It had its merits, especially in a job apparently as dangerous as working in the Medico-Legal lab.

I sat on the couch in Brennan's office with my back to the glass walls and door, slouched down low so that someone walking past wouldn't see me without coming inside first. I wanted to avoid Saroyan without making it evident that that's what I was trying to do and looking through my contacts again; the list of people I could have a need to contact had expanded from my boss and an emergency hotline (sad, small list) to a lengthier set in my phone.

Hodgins had already programmed in his own, of course, since he'd bought it for me and was probably my first emergency contact, what with me being on his insurance's family plan. He'd also collected Angela's, Booth's, and Zach's, after ascertaining that yes, Zach _had_ a phone, he just didn't use it that much. He'd transferred Brennan's from his to mine, and had put all the contacts in with no titles, just the first and last names, which I liked and didn't change. I had an entire family on speed dial – and in addition to that, I'd added Amy Cullen's when we'd become fast friends, and in the last month, I'd gotten Russ's phone number when he insisted we trade off, and Rebecca and I had somewhat reluctantly traded.

It's not like Rebecca and I really talked. The only reason we could contact each other was regarding Parker. I wanted to be in the kid's life, I had admitted to myself a while ago, but I was willing to be passive if Rebecca wanted. I hadn't told her that myself, but I thought I made it clear enough by only being around Parker when Booth explicitly invited me. I knew how I came off to people at first, and I knew what could be assumed just from my history, so while I had her phone to call if I was ever with Parker and she needed to be contacted, she had mine in case she wanted me for something involving the four-year-old.

Still… impressive list, considering how very few people I'd actually liked beforehand. I was texting back and forth with Amy while waiting for Brennan to gather up her things so that we could go meet Booth. We'd be representing the Jeffersonian in a meeting with some other adults, considering the prolific victims of the train crash and preceding murder. I'm not glued to my phone, but the sad truths are that, firstly, Amy is stuck in the hospital while her cancer progresses until she either recovers or… well. And we've all resigned by now that she won't recover, as a physical improbability. Secondly, Amy and I serve as each other's confidants. She doesn't want to talk about her problems with her parents because she knows any mention or implication of her cancer will hurt them. She likes my stories, and she's an unbiased third party to my struggles.

 _To: Amy Cullen_

 _Nope. I'm very pointedly not-sulking in Bren's office. How's the French Revolution going?_

I sent the message and then leaned back on the couch. I may also be acting as Amy's occasional tutor – not because she needed tutoring, but because even though she had a very good hospital excuse from her classes, she still wanted to learn, to preserve what was left of her former lifestyle as best as she could.

"You should be okay with Dr. Saroyan getting the Head of Forensics job." Hodgins broke the silence between Brennan and I after rapping his knuckles shortly on the interior of the doorframe. The door had been opened, but he'd have barged in even if it was closed. Boundaries aren't as strict as they are in other institutions.

Brennan raised her eyes from her desk to the entomologist. "Why is that?" She asked, sounding bored but her shoulders slightly stiffened. She was miffed about it, that was for sure; and I knew she hadn't particularly _wanted_ the job. Hell, I wasn't even sure she'd applied for it! But I don't think she appreciated that Goodman had instated the position and left before she had the chance to argue, because in place of Goodman, it made a superior that Brennan was supposed to answer to, with more knowledge of forensics and therefore better able to judge her decisions. It bothered me a bit, but not to the same extent; I was barely qualified for the security pass around my neck, and I didn't want to be a supervisor anyway. I wanted to be a scientist, and an investigator, which I was. I was quite thrilled with my place.

"Because you are a strictly rubber-to-the-road, hardball scientist." Hodgins had rehearsed this, most likely; maybe with Angela making suggestions. They were more likely to meddle than Zach. "Not a flesh-pressing, ink-stained, policy-making…" he faltered before he said something particularly rude. "… Wanktard," he finished eloquently.

I smirked, eyes sharp, my expression the one I used when I didn't want to talk about something, or when I just wanted to be left alone. Luckily for me, the team had learned a bit _too_ quickly how to read my behavior, and when I didn't say anything meant to offend, they knew I was just irritated. "Once again, Hodgins, I'm beginning to question your mastery of the English language, given your strong propensity for making up words when Americans are known for having plenty of insults already."

I looked down to my phone again, wanting to just be done with the conversation. I get that Saroyan's not going away, and even if I don't like her, it's very possible that we can still work around each other; but first, I'd like the chance to acclimatize to the difference in the workplace, which was like home, after Brennan's apartment. I can be an adult, but what I'd like people to remember is that I was an abused outcast who lived on my own after I was ditched. Turns out the foster parents had good reason, but that didn't make it hurt less. Getting used to other people takes longer for me.

"What are her qualifications?" Brennan asked. Neither commented when I slid my thumb over the phone screen, both knowing full well that I was still listening and paying attention, even if I wasn't actively engaged.

 _From: Amy Cullen_

 _So far King Louis, Marie, and their son have been marched all the way back to Paris. Wasn't Marie Antoinette executed?_

"Chief Coroner of New York for two years, Assistant Federal Coroner before that." Hodgins spun around, caught red-handed, and blinked rapidly before trying to recover his cool. Saroyan had come up behind him sneakily, and now stood with her arms crossed. She wasn't… angry, just sort of… I don't know. Disheartened? She raised her eyebrows at Brennan while Hodgins tried to extract himself from the conversation by stepping out from between them. "How am I doing?"

Brennan wasn't one to lie typically, so she steeled herself with a deep inhale. "… Very well," she acknowledged politely, though while she didn't – wouldn't – fake praise, she clearly didn't appreciate having to give it. "Impressive."

 _To: Amy Cullen_

 _Marie Antoinette, meet Guillotine. Guillotine, the Queen. This particular guillotine has been practicing for this moment with several other guillotines in a performance known as the Reign of Terror. Please, cut your hair so it's not in the way. The streets are already flooded with blood, but God forbid that your hair gets in the way of the blade._

It's a good thing Amy is for some reason amused by my morbid sense of humor; I think the violence in my response was probably enough for her to realize that I wasn't in the happiest mood right now.

I looked up after sending. Saroyan was looking at me, watching. I met her gaze but didn't respond. If she wanted me to praise her, then she clearly hadn't grasped my attitude yet. If she wanted my opinion, then she could ask instead of watching me text. I stared back, impassive, until she dipped her head politely and looked away. The awkward tension was broken when Brennan's phone rang, her ringtone generic but loud.

She picked it up quickly and accepted the call. "Brennan," she greeted through the phone.

Saroyan had turned her attention to Hodgins. The flustered doctor was evidently not going to get away unscathed after insulting her, and though Saroyan wasn't angry, she was greatly unsettling Hodgins.

"We were… discussing her mother's case," Hodgins excused weakly. He looked to me for help. I shrugged. I must have reminded him of something because he pointed at me halfheartedly. "Well, and… and Holly's foster parents', because they were involved, too, except we just only found that out, uh… towards the end."

His rambling must have been key enough that he felt uncomfortable. Saroyan just nodded to him, letting him get away with it. "Fine." It was a dismissal; he could have run away then, but he stayed in place, fumbling with his hands.

Brennan nodded. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes," she said to whomever she was talking to before hanging up. She lifted her jacket from the back of her office chair and raised her arms to shrug it on while looking across to me, ignoring Saroyan. "We have a meeting at the bureau that Booth needs us present for."

"Let's be on our way, then." I said. I sighed internally. I didn't like the meetings that Booth usually took me to. They tended to be with politicians, high-profile businessmen, or – the worst – with Cullen, the deputy director of the FBI. Cullen and I had started to get along better when he mellowed out as his daughter's condition worsened, and then when I started spending more time with Amy and, therefore, him. The politicians and businessmen, though? Most of the meetings I'd had with them had been boring, if not annoying.

Brennan and I left the office, slipping out past Hodgins and leaving Saroyan there without whatever it was she'd come to the office for in the first place. We had somewhere to be, and she should have asked rather than eavesdropping. We fell into pace beside each other, our footsteps matching in time.

My phone buzzed in my pocket again.

"Yes… good, Dr. Brennan." Saroyan's voice rang out across the lab when she called after us, but I didn't hear the clicking of heels giving chase. "We'll chat later."

Brennan reached above her head and waved her hand in noncommittal acknowledgment. I noticed that she didn't strictly agree to talking later.

As we were walking out on Saroyan, Hodgins desperately flailed to try to recover whatever favor he'd previously had. "It's a… ah, very interesting case. Brennan identified skeletal remains as her mother's, killed by a blow to the head… Initial suspect was her father, but in the end, we arrested a pig farmer hitman in Witness Protection Program. Added wrinkle, but…" he would have kept rambling until we got to the very end of the case, except that Saroyan took pity and cut him off.

"Dr. Hodgins?" Ah, out with the Hodge-Podge, in with the formalities. A small part of me was pleased, and then I felt guilty afterwards. "You're chattering me to death because you're hoping I'll forget you called me a wanktard."

"It's a… made up word." Hodgins was sinking fast. "No meaning," he reassured.

I smirked. _I guess making up words is more beneficial than I thought._

* * *

We met in one of the bureau's conference rooms with three other people – a middle-aged woman with light blonde hair in a high, tight bun, wire glasses that almost looked red, and a slight dusting of makeup in a pantsuit was one of them. She sat at the head of the long table, apparently the person who had called the meeting in the first place at last notice.

Then there was an African American man with short, dark brown hair cut above his ears, a blazer on over a buttoned and pristinely-ironed shirt, shoes neatly polished and clicking evenly when he walked inside, holding himself with confidence but not arrogance.

The final person that I didn't know was a Western European man in a tuxedo with dark blonde hair, blue eyes, a folder on his lap and a humble and overly quiet air around him, like an introvert. He hadn't spoken anything other than polite greetings to the overall group.

The woman with the immaculately tied hair cleared her throat to begin the meeting when Booth pulled the door shut. The lock clicked and he took his seat again, crossing his legs with his chair at an angle. "My name is Lisa Supek, and I am the assistant U.S. attorney attached to this case. I'd like to hear first from the National Transportation and Safety Board. Mr. Hobbs?"

Hobbs turned out to be the African American sitting directly across from me on the table. "Thank you," he said respectfully to Supek, then addressed the table as a whole. "At eight-oh-four last evening, a high-speed commuter train struck a private vehicle. A car derailed, killing three people, including Senator Paula Davis." I was fairly sure that everyone here knew that already, but then I guessed that someone was recording the conversation for later reference. "Preliminary indication shows that it was placed there purposefully."

Supek turned her attention to Brennan. I wasn't really sure why I was there, since I couldn't tell them anything Brennan or Booth couldn't. At first I'd thought being part of these meetings was them trying to include me. Now I think it's as much because of my reputation (which has grown significantly since I stopped being a nobody and became a hero story to the press) as it is anything else, but I doubt anyone but Brennan would admit to that, and honestly I don't care _why_ I'm allowed in enough to ask.

"Dr. Brennan, was the Jeffersonian able to confirm that the driver of the car was Warren Lynch?"

Brennan nodded. "Dental records and physical characteristics establish that, yes." The way she talked in these kinds of meetings was the same way she addressed people in a courtroom; not too much empathy, but rather with clear, definitive facts. She liked to believe the jury were rational and leaned on evidence more than deportment or sociability. I wanted to believe it worked like that, but in most cases, if she didn't use laymen's terms so the average civilian would understand, they tended to lean towards the other experts.

"The vehicle is registered to Mr. Lynch. We verified that the jewelry found on the body was his, plus, we have this." Booth picked up a remote that he'd put in front of his space earlier. He aimed it to a projector screen at the back of the room and turned it on. It brought up digital images from a raised height, like a traffic camera, and it was a photograph zoomed in on a car with a blurry but distinguishable face in the driver's seat.

Supek narrowed her eyes. "A photograph from the carpool lane?"

Booth nodded. "At one fifty-six last afternoon, Mr. Lynch drove illegally in the diamond lane on interstate two-seventy. The good old Maryland state police cameras, they caught the infraction."

I pointed to the monitor with a sigh and tipped my head to the side, stretching my neck. "And that is most certainly the vehicle Lynch was found in on the tracks, confirmed by make, model… our forensic artist was able to recreate the license plate after the damage from the fire. It matches the car registered to Warren Lynch. Our forensic entomologist also recovered enough chips to recover the shade of the car was the same. All of this, plus Lynch's remains being in the car, confirms beyond reasonable doubt that they are the same vehicle."

"No one saw or heard from Warren Lynch after this photo was taken," Booth established, looking around the conference room for the various reactions from the others.

Supek was disapproving, while Hobbs was carefully observing the photograph projected on the screen. "You can't honestly expect someone to believe that Warren Lynch committed suicide by driving into a train," she pointed out with exasperation.

The quieter, shier man spoke up. "Ah, Daniel Burrows, Securities Exchange Commission." He bit his lip before continuing when he had everyone looking at him. "We were about to lay charges against Mr. Lynch that would not only wipe him out financially, but send him to prison for several years."

I wished scandals were new, but between the politicians, the businessmen, and the corrupt televangelists, I didn't even have it in me to _pretend_ to be surprised that Lynch had been in a situation like that. "What kind of charges?" I asked instead, sounding mostly bored.

Burrows shifted in his seat uncertainly. "I… apologize," he offered, apparently deciding that it was better that information remained quiet. "But without it being pertinent to the investigation, it would be best for that to remain in the closet until this is cleared up."

I didn't appreciate it, but everyone else accepted it. Like I'd told Brennan, this was the bureaucratic red tape.

"I'd heard rumors, but for a man like Lynch to kill himself…" Supek shook her head, as amazed as she was disappointed by the deaths.

Brennan leaned forward in her chair and spoke up again. "Mr. Lynch did not commit suicide," she ruled certainly.

"Dr. Brennan's and Miss Kirkland's examination shows that he was dead for at least six hours before the train struck his car," Booth confirmed, elaborating on it before Brennan was asked to.

"Dead how?" Supek questioned.

 _Dead how? What? Um, what are the options here? Dead-style, vampire-style, zombie-style, Winchester-style…?_

It occurred to me after I thought this that she was asking about the cause of death, and I just hadn't thought of it immediately because of both the odd way she phrased it and that it seemed pretty obvious if we knew, we would have told. My mouth was already running, though.

"Um, dead, as in… not breathing, slammed into by a train, and lit on fire."

Booth's lips quirked. Brennan didn't seem to find it as amusing. "We haven't determined the exact cause of death yet."

"But can we assume that it as foul play?" The attorney patiently asked again, trying to figure out the basis from which we needed to operate.

"Well, yeah… I mean, unless he died of natural causes after spontaneously deciding to drive his car onto a railroad track," I said, beginning to get uncomfortable. I mean, I know supposition isn't good to go off of, and, as Brennan says, it's best not to jump to conclusions… but _come on._ There _is_ a degree of logic involved in most thought processes, right?! If a guy falls to his death next to a building, we assume he fell from the building. We don't ask ridiculous questions about if he had a jet pack.

"When it becomes public knowledge that Warren Lynch is dead, the stock in Lynchpin International is going to plummet." Burrows looked around the room to survey reaction and see if he needed to offer any further explanation, but I'm pretty sure everyone there knew how the stock market works.

"Well, it sucks for the people who invested in Lynchpin, but otherwise…" Supek started to shrug. We wanted to look into the deaths here, not mourn the loss of money.

"That's motive for murder," Booth interrupted, pointing out with a glance at Brennan.

Brennan shifted in confusion, looking back to Burrows questioningly. "How is losing money a motive?"

"It's called shorting the stock," Burrows elaborated. "Basically, you bet the share price is going to fall, and if it does, you collect."

Supek considered this thoughtfully, her head tipped to the side. "How much are we talking?" She asked.

The man had to shrug, not knowing completely the exact rates that Lynchpin's stock would fall to or be put at, so he estimated, "Tens, maybe hundreds of millions."

* * *

We brought Warren Lynch's wife into Booth's office sooner rather than later so that she could know her husband was deceased. Keeping it out of the public was one thing, but it was another to conceal it from his family. That was something Booth, Brennan, and I had always agreed on.

Besides, it served the double purpose of having someone to confirm that the jewelry we'd found on the body was Lynch's.

She lawyered up before she even got here with someone who they'd worked with before to protect the Lynches from civil lawsuits, so we knew that the lawyer would be familiar with the couple. If we wanted to make any accusations or ask something where she may implicate herself, we'd need to be careful how we did it so that the lawyer couldn't tell from the get-go.

We showed her the small evidence bags laid out in a row at the front of Booth's desk, and she recognized them instantly. "Yes, these are Warren's things," she confirmed. "I bought him the I.D. bracelet on our first anniversary."

Booth was pulling the plastic bag tight across the back of a wristwatch, trying to read the engraving on the back of it. _"Casu Consulto,"_ he made out aloud, and then look at Brianna, making a face at the Latin. Latin was not his friend, unless he was using it to judge Brennan for her relaxation choices. "What does that mean?"

"Accidentally on purpose," I sighed, unintentionally speaking in synchrony with Brennan, who was standing beside the desk. I was sitting in Booth's office chair, which I'd dragged out from behind his computer and pulled around to the side. I had my legs crossed and was leaning forward, elbows bent on my thighs.

Booth looked at Brennan and said sotto, "Why do you know things like this?"

Brianna rolled her eyes as they went off topic and Brennan raised her shoulders defensively. She didn't see a problem with knowing Latin. The wife, a pretty blonde woman much shorter than her husband with long golden hair and expensive diamond earrings, interrupted them so that she could answer questions and get out of here as soon as she could.

"It was kind of my husband's motto," she said. Her lawyer, a brunette Mrs. Hochman, looked up from the briefcase she had sitting in her lap.

"Mr. Lynch wrote about it in his autobiography," she offered for context. "He played basketball in college." I'm not surprised, given his height. Coaches like basketball players who are tall; it's easier for them to reach the basket. "Made it all the way to the national championships."

Brianna was nodded along, listening to the lawyer speak, and started to help. "Warren was about to score, but another player locked him out of the key."

"He injured the opposing player, sent him to the hospital, and made it look completely inadvertent." The lawyer raised her eyebrows and shut her mouth. I got the feeling this wasn't an action that she entirely approved of, but it had been years ago, and there was never a way to reasonably prove it.

I just focused on pretending to know what 'locked him out of the key' meant.

"Accidentally on purpose," Booth muttered, looking at the golden watch again.

Brennan looked repulsed by the idea of injuring someone just for the sake of a seemingly trivial game. "He wrote this about himself, as if were a _good_ thing?" She asked in disbelief.

The lawyer responded before Brianna had the chance to. "Well, you don't become Warren Lynch by playing by the rules," she pointed out, sounding rational. Notoriety was better-known than good-hearted spirits, but I didn't think that success depended on whether or not you were honest. Then again, he was a businessman, so who knows? Maybe she was subtly hinting that he wasn't always the most honest person in his work.

Brianna looked to all of the karats in jewelry and accessories. "I'm still his wife, so… this all comes to me now, is that correct?"

It would go to his wife legally unless we had any reason to withhold it from her, but once it was confirmed to belong to the former basketball star, we had no more use for it. Still, it interested me that she said 'still' as if she weren't suddenly a widow.

 _"_ _Still?"_ I asked, having always taken a particular interest in how people spoke when they were being interrogated. They often gave small things away, even if they weren't of consequence. "Were the two of you having marital issues?"

She looked irritated at herself like she regretted saying anything, but we probably would have unearthed it ourselves if she hadn't unthinkingly offered the bait. "Warren and I were separating," she grudgingly admitted, preferring to be honest over lying to the police.

"Why?" Brennan asked, having learned by now the importance of relationships when it came to murder investigations.

She shifted uncomfortably, which only made me want to know more. "Infidelity."

"Hmm." Booth hummed thoughtfully and gave her a polite smile, as if showing that he didn't mean to offend with the follow-up question. "On whose part?"

Brianna leaned forward edgily. "I found out that Warren was seeing someone… only, some _one_ turned out to be-"

"Some _dozen,"_ Hochman completed for her. Brianna still looked more than a little insulted, humiliated at remembering it. I didn't think it was something for her to be embarrassed about, though – I get how sometimes people justify themselves or their partners cheating on each other by some line about needs not being met, but damn, if you're going to commit to someone, then communicate or stop being committed. You can't half-commit to someone. It's not something done in fractions, not when you declare your commitment on legal documents and call yourself married.

"I'm going to need a list," Booth informed almost apologetically, making Brianna's expression turn a little stonier.

Hochman quickly glanced over at Brianna and then decided that, since the woman wasn't saying anything else, she was going to. "When Brianna confronted Warren, he had a private investigator look into _her_ activities," she informed for full cooperation.

"I admit, he didn't come up dry."

Ah. Now the fidgeting and humiliation made a little more sense.

Booth flipped open his notepad and clicked out the tip of a pen from his desk. "Private investigator's name?" He prompted, looking down to the paper and touching the pen to the top sheet.

"Rick Turco," the lawyer supplied helpfully while Brianna began to gather her husband's jewelry and drop them into her black, silver-studded handbag. "He was one of Lynch's all-purpose, go-to, dirty work fixer." Ah. She didn't approve of the investigator much, then, either. For someone who worked regularly with the Lynches, she sure didn't seem to appreciate their decisions very much.

Booth coughed. Instead of writing down the name, he clicked off the pen and threw it back onto the desk inelegantly. "Yeah, I'm familiar with Rick Turco," he sighed. Brennan looked to me behind his back in question. I shrugged. I'd never heard of the name, but Booth didn't seem too excited to talk to him again. "Thank you for your cooperation."

* * *

Booth came with us back to the lab because he was how we'd gotten to the FBI. Rather than making us take a cab, he drove us while he was on the phone with Turco's representative, whom he knew by first name without being told. He was far less than pleased with being forced by circumstance into associating with the Lynches' private investigator, and it made me wonder if I should be eager to meet the guy or just try to avoid him.

"Cheating spouse that stands to inherit all corrupt business practices, and Turco the private dick." Booth groaned, throwing his head back and following after Brennan and I while we hurried through the lab, going past the exam platform in the wide open area of the Medico-Legal lab. Because he wasn't looking, he didn't see Hodgins hopping down from the platform and approaching, so either he was going to be pleasantly surprised or unpleasantly bothered without warning. "Where do we _start?"_ He complained.

"Two types of glass were embedded in what was left of Lynch." Hodgins didn't even touch the complaining that he overheard, instead walking on Brennan's other side with empty hands and a lab coat fluttering behind him.

"Start with glass," Brennan decided swiftly, ignoring the FBI agent's plight.

Hodgins nodded and glanced over at me in acknowledgment before he started talking. The way this lab is supposed to work is with Brennan in the highest hierarchical ring when an authority is actually called for; the rest of the time, we govern ourselves in a respectful democracy. A _meritocracy,_ in fact, otherwise I wouldn't have the respect from them that I do. Although Hodgins could act as Brennan's boss because of his administrative position, he chooses to defer judgment.

"Tempered automotive safety glass and silicate."

"Tempered glass came from the car windows," Brennan dismissed it, seeing as it was a totally normal and expected find for the context and the crime scene. Hodgins nodded to conclude that that's what he'd thought it was from, too. "What about the other?"

"It's seventy percent amorphous silicon dioxide." Brennan bobbed her head to show that she had heard while she reached to the back collar of her jacket and gathered up her hair from underneath, pulling it back and scraping it together in a low ponytail. No more questions were asked from her regarding the evidence.

I gave it two seconds before Booth asked, and I wasn't disappointed.

"What's that?" He asked, looking at Hodgins' back in not even a little bit concealed irritation. Hodgins wasn't one of his favorite people on most days. They were friends when it counted, and… I didn't think I'd ever be able to forget seeing them as my heroes, rushing in and saving my life when I'd been kidnapped. The point is that Hodgins is too against the government and a little too rebellious for Booth's tastes.

Hodgins turned around to walk backwards. I thought that by remaining within strangling distance, he was overestimating Booth's patience. He held up his hands to mime the shape of a glass jar or wide bottle. "It's like a common domestic container."

That Booth understood, but he was still annoyed, and an answer apparently didn't make it go away. "Oh!" He brightened falsely and then glowered at the entomologist, who had gotten over his habit of quailing away. "Like a jar," he specified. "Why can't we just say 'a jar?'"

Hodgins departed from our group when we entered his lab, which had been partially claimed by Zach for the use of some computers. Brennan wrapped her ponytail holder around her hair a last time and then let it go, running her fingers over smooth strands to check that it was tight enough. Booth followed in but didn't enter as far into the scientists' domain.

"Anything new, Zacharoni?" Brennan asked Zach in greeting as he sat in a chair in front of a computer monitor, looking at digitized copies of Lynch's body.

"Zacharoni?" Booth audibly protested, making a face at the apparently silly name and wondering just where the hell it had come from. It made more sense to the rest of us, since we had been present to hear Saroyan endear Zach with the cutesy nickname.

Even though it wasn't the kind of thing Brennan did, Zach still knew who she was talking to. He leaned back slightly and looked over his shoulder, pushing himself slightly away from the desk so that she could have room to look at the screen if she wanted to. "The victim's left elbow and shoulder were badly dislocated post-mortem," he answered in response to the initial question.

Booth was no stranger to the simpler terminology, so obviously he understood what post-mortem meant, but considering we'd already decided that the train crashed into the car after he was already dead, it was an acceptable question if the dislocation occurred as part of the crash or not. "You mean, between the time he died and the time he got hit by the train?"

"Blood flow was non-existent when the dislocation occurred." Brennan said thoughtfully, not so much to Booth as she was thinking out loud to herself.

"Yes," I said more plainly for the man. I didn't understand what he'd done to be getting the icier treatment from Brennan – maybe she was just in one of the moods where she didn't feel like dealing with him.

He shook his head and pointed between Brennan and Zach like he wasn't sure who to command. "Okay, you guys do this stuff and I'll start on Turco." _Biting the bullet, I see,_ I thought with no small amount of amusement. It had to be easy to read in my countenance, because when he looked at me to say something, he did a double-take and sternly said, "It's not funny."

"What's Turco?" Zach looked at Brennan for clarification.

"Private investigator," she supplied, feeling perfectly up to being helpful to her intern.

"Turco's an affliction," the agent insulted snappishly, turning around agitatedly to leave the lab.

"You… probably shouldn't call me Zacharoni." Looking up at her with tentative puppy eyes, Zach played the part of an uncertain, innocent victim in the midst of a territory war. By trying to adopt Saroyan's nickname for her friend, she'd probably just been trying to remind him of the social structure, and that Saroyan isn't the only friend he has here, but instead she'd accidentally crossed a boundary.

It wasn't really a big deal – it's just something small, like that Hodgins gets to call me Xena, but it would be strange if Booth started.

"Yeah," Brennan admitted, leaning over him to see the monitor and wincing visibly at the reminder. "I knew that the moment I said it." Well, at least she got where it had gone wrong.

"Kid, you coming?" Booth's voice came echoing back impatiently.

Shrugging my shoulders, I gave the other two an apologetic smile as I backed up to leave. Considering that I hadn't known I was invited, I didn't think he had much of a right to be impatient with me. Besides, I was the only one who'd given him a straight answer in the last ten minutes, so didn't that get me some brownie points?

* * *

Booth and I met with Turco the private investigator in a place called the Royal Diner, a corner restaurant Booth arranged to wait at. I guess it was because it was neutral territory – not ours, but not really Turco's either. Of course, then a waitress recognized Booth and he ordered a large plate of French fries, a coffee, and asked me what I wanted to drink, and I guessed that maybe it was because he just liked the food here.

I think he took me with him to get Saroyan and I away from each other for a while. I chose to pretend it was actually because I was good at lying and keeping my cool and dealing with unsettling people.

Turco met us at the arranged time while we were eating our French fries, Booth dipping his liberally in ketchup sauce. We didn't have to wave him down, because it was a small place; homely, not quite with a fifties vibe but with the sort of style of a diner from way back then, tables by the windows and stools by the bars for people to sit up there, not unlike in a Waffle House. We could see everyone else, aside from those in the kitchen, just by where we were sitting.

Our server offered to deliver more fries for the investigator, but he smoothly declined while he sat down. Turco was an older man, in his fifties with already silvery hair and dark hazel eyes. He was white, but his skin looked more tan than pale, and he wore an immaculate, crisp gray suit.

"Agent Booth, I'm a private investigator," was his bright, laughing response when Booth started getting over the pleasantries he'd tried to make and instead asked about Lynch's business with a private investigator. "My greatest asset is my discretion."

I took Booth's distraction as an opportunity to steal some of his ketchup on a fry. "Brianna Lynch already told us in no uncertain terms that you were employed by her husband, Warren Lynch." I popped the fry in my mouth and watched him carefully for his behavioral response. I used both parties' names so he had fewer loopholes, if any, to manipulate my speech and offer potentially misleading replies.

Turco chuckled. He was personable and friendly despite the elusive nature of his career and his evasive answers. "Well, Miss Lynch is welcome to _say_ whatever she likes."

Booth raised his eyebrows at him over the table decorated with fries and drinks. "You know, the client confidentiality thing? It no longer exists when the client is dead."

Patronizing, now, and although I trusted Booth, I now wished we were in flipped seats, so that I could stand and run or fight more quickly. It was a long-since ingrained instinct that wouldn't fade just because I trusted someone I was with, though I was trying to work on being more flexible in comfort.

"That's not the assurance I give my very demanding, very high-profile clients. Till death do us _not_ part."

 _Very high-profile._ Huh. So… they'd be careful about who they were associated or connected with, and if something bad got out about him, those high-profile clients would flock away to protect themselves. I smirked. "Those very demanding, very high-profile clients – how would they feel if they found out that you were getting illegal street heroin for Warren Lynch?"

Turco paused, canted his head to the side, looking surprised. Then again, the best investigators are the good liars. They lie to empathize for information, they lie for safety, they lie for many more reasons, too. "What?"

"Lynch was a regular heroin user," I explained shortly, because if he still didn't understand, then he probably wasn't smart enough to have pulled the crime off, anyway. How much simpler could I make it?

"I open up a drug investigation on _you,_ Mr. Turco." Booth hypothesized, smiling and sighing after a swallow of coffee. He set his mug down while Turco watched with carefully cynical eyes, now more alert. "Once the press gets wind of that, your high-profile clients find some other unprincipled Mr. Fix-Its."

"Warren Lynch was a _junkie?"_ Shock melted away quickly, turning to a weary but solemn expression like nothing could really surprise him too much anymore. Turco leaned back in the seat with his hands falling to his lap. "What's your evidence?"

"Forensically collected evidence from the Jeffersonian indicates a decline in average bone mass due to the chemical abuse taking a toll on the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis. The results of the chemical imbalances and corresponding damage to the pituitary is consistent with heroin." I answered mostly from memory but rephrased things so that they were in my own words. Phone calls with Brennan were sometimes difficult, but they were usually highly informative. It turned out that that during their deeper investigation, Brennan and Zach had found ossification between the ribs and sternum which was consistent with long-term heroin usage.

Booth shook his head. "Nothing says 'junkie' like your gonad's axis, Ricky."

Resisting the urge to rub at my forehead with my fingers, I corrected thoughtlessly, "Gonadal, Booth. Gonadal."

Turco pushed himself back, his hands sliding down onto his thighs. Just from looking at his expression, I'd have guessed he'd been told someone died. "I had no idea…" he breathed, stunned, and then gave himself a full-body shudder to shake off the surprise. "I certainly never procured any heroin for him."

Booth snorted. "Well, Warren Lynch sure wasn't trolling for ten-dollar hits in Lincoln Heights." He'd have been seen if that had been the case, and reported a long time ago. His features were pretty distinguishable.

Then Turco smiled, like a wolf. "Well, Agent Booth, you know my rep. I'm a _sin eater._ I make problems… _go away."_

"You mean, like when Brianna Lynch found out Warren was conducting multiple affairs behind her back?" I asked, fairly certain that polyamory hadn't been a part of the relationship. And besides – in a polyamorous relationship, the other relationships aren't supposed to be behind the other's back. Communication is key.

Knowing that we clearly had enough dirt on Lynch as it was, Turco sighed and looked around again, a habit he didn't seem to know how to drop. He leaned in over the table but stayed on his half. "Alright. Anything I say, strictest confidence, correct?"

"Within reason," I offered, because I couldn't promise that it wouldn't come out at some point for the prosecution, or for interrogative purposes. "But if you refuse to say, then you can be arrested for obstruction of justice."

You'd think that my favorite charge would be homicide or child neglect or abuse, but actually, my favorite is turning out to be obstruction. It can be applied to a lot of situations and it's a good threat to get people to talk, especially if they aren't always aware of what does or does not constitute obstruction.

Turco took what he could get, anyway, and saw a carrot-stick situation when he was presented with one. The stick was the threat, and the carrot was the unsaid deal that it wouldn't be broadcasted. He strode forward for the carrot, predictably. "Warren Lynch brought me in to deal with a blackmailer."

Booth was obviously taken by surprise, but it didn't make him anywhere near speechless. "Warren Lynch was being blackmailed?" He hissed, voice low so that the conversation stayed private and away from any listeners or casual nearby patrons or staff. Blackmail was always a good motive, but when it happened to a wealthy, well-known businessman… the repercussions of it getting out could hurt a lot of people, including Turco and Lynch's possibly innocent wife.

"By one of the women he was sleeping with?" I questioned. A private investigator would have to have known that. And I would have said 'girlfriends' but that implied a commitment that Lynch obviously hadn't felt any strength of.

Turco dipped his head briefly. "That would be my assumption, yes." He raised his head again and glanced out the diner window. "I'd paid them off before, but this was a much bigger deal… more serious." He raised his shoulders slightly, jacket crinkling. _Recently ironed._ "Had to be the heroin, right?"

"Let it play out?" Booth inquired.

"I negotiated the payment from a mill to a quarter million, paid them off, and that was three days ago." _Before_ Lynch had gone missing or turned up dead, so maybe it was about something different… or maybe the payout didn't go quite so well, or maybe they just wanted to secretly get the money before striking more permanent revenge.

"How?" Booth questioned sharply.

"Dead drop at Rock Creek Park," Turco promptly replied without missing a beat.

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my ankles underneath the table, doing the same to my arms in front of my chest. "Do you have _any_ idea who the blackmailer was?"

Turco met my eyes evenly, not showing any sign of deceit or fear. Not so strangely, I also didn't feel like I was being respected, either. "No," he replied, firm and trying not to leave any sort of room for argument. "I got a phone call. When I traced it back, it dead-ended on a stolen cell phone."

* * *

I returned to the Medico-Legal lab after Booth fed me a lunch full of carbs. After waving at the security guards, I slid into the lab and ran my hands through my hair, flipping my bangs back while strands waved around my face. I was considering dying my hair – something bright, punkish… changing my hairstyle up, too.

Maybe there was a degree of formality required for testimony in court, or meetings, but not only was I just an intern rather than a fixed employee, I was a teenager who had been repeatedly brought on as a consult. I could wear my hair however the hell I liked, so long as I didn't do anything to reflect poorly on the Jeffersonian. Some acts of rebellion against Saroyan's attempts at a hierarchical structure would not end badly – just piss her off and establish that she wasn't in control of me.

Brennan was standing on the platform with Zach and Saroyan. I slid my card deftly and jumped up the stairs. "You did a good job," she praised the grad student, who smiled slightly at the praise. Both were wearing their latex gloves and lab jackets. I wasn't wearing a coat or gloves. The coat was more of a formality, since it didn't zip or button up to keep my clothes hidden, so if I were just dropping by or leaving soon, no one had ever bothered telling me to care about the jacket as much as gloves.

"We talked to Turco," I announced, pulling my hair back behind my neck and twisting it around my hand in a loose knot that wouldn't last. Speaking far more to Brennan and Zach, I continued. Saroyan just heard me relaying information because she was there, on the other side of the exam table. "According to him, Lynch was being blackmailed. Turco arranged a drop of a quarter million dollars three days ago to an unknown source. He figures it was for heroin."

"Speaking of," Saroyan inserted herself smoothly, her fingers knit together in front of her abdomen. She wasn't wearing gloves, just talking with the other two when I'd returned. "Given your heroin bombshell, I went back to what tissue remained. There were traces of laudanine and reticuline, alkaloids found in the opium poppy." Saroyan focused on me with a laser-sharp focus like a hawk. "Booth told you first?"

"He didn't need to," I replied, catching the slight surprise she felt that I was kept in the loop. "I was there."

Her eyebrows started to pull down into a frown. "You went into the field to question a person of interest?"

 _Objections?_ I thought almost smugly. "It's really not a new development."

Brennan didn't even bat an eyelash at the not-quite-challenge going on right next to her. "I'd like Angela to do a facial reconstruction," she said to Zach, who nodded, intending to take the skull up to the artist when the group dispersed. She glanced to Saroyan. "Confirm my finding?"

Saroyan nodded, but before she could start to speak, Zach interrupted. "It's handy having a pathologist right in the building," he murmured thoughtfully, meant mostly for Brennan and I. I shot him one of those 'are you kidding me' looks. This was _not_ supposed to be a time for her to hear others praising her. _We do not praise people we're not particularly liking, Zach._

The pathologist had a slight smirk, having definitely heard, but she continued with what she'd been about to say without remark. "To turn opium into heroin, it's exposed to hot acetic anhydride, which produces eighteen neutral impurities. The ratio of these impurities indicates the heroin's origin – in this case, Mexico."

I crossed my arms and put most of my weight onto one foot sassily. "Mexican heroin is the most common kind in America, being smuggled in with immigrants, weapons, and other government-regulated stuffs across the border."

"I wonder if there's anything we can do to narrow it down further…" Brennan caught on, biting gently at her lower lip and sucking it in, eyeing Saroyan and waited for a response.

Amused, almost certainly aware of what we were doing, Saroyan smiled. "Gas chromatography shows there's also fentanyl in the heroin."

"Fentanyl?" I repeated after her, a spark of recognition growing when I said it myself. I pretended it rang no bells. "I don't think I've ever heard of it."

Zach turned to his side to stare at me in confusion, and, of course, he loudly countered my statement. "But last week, you and Hodgins debated over the fatality of small doses of high-temperature, potentially lethal drugs versus weaker, fentanyl-enhanced street compounds." I remembered the argument well. The entomologist and I had eventually come to a consensus that neither of us could win the argument due to the variables between multiple different potential outcomes depending on the individual drugs in the hypothetical question. But it ruined any subtlety to my attempts to tell Saroyan she'd have to actually prove herself, just like I did when I was brought into these cases. He looked back to Saroyan and informed, just in case she hadn't already gotten it, "She already knows what fentanyl is."

Saroyan blinked, but when she opened her eyes, her smile was both small and indulgent. She met my eyes to accept the challenge to her competence, but answered, proving that she was going to be the better person here. I wasn't too happy about feeling like the more suspicious and less trusting person. "It's a narcotic which boosts the effects of the heroin. According to metro cops, fourteen addicts overdosed this week off of one shipment."

I glanced to Brennan to see what she'd do next while I clenched my jaw noticeably. "Have you told Booth?" The anthropologist asked, looking back to Saroyan in question.

"No, I'll leave that up to you." Polite smile again. Her charisma and patience was laudable, if nothing else, although she apparently knew her stuff about heroin. I don't know if I had wanted her to have the answers or be prepared, so I wasn't sure if it counted as a win or not. "How'd I do?" She asked knowingly, unlacing her fingers and offering Zach a smile before she went to leave.

The other intern looked to Brennan, who was staring straight at the skull in frustration. "I thought she did quite well," Zach offered.

I sighed, raised my arm, and punched Zach in the shoulder.

"Ah!" He raised his hand, covering his arm and looking at me in confusion like a wounded or kicked puppy.

"You weren't supposed to tell her it was a test, genius," I said with a roll of my eyes, growling it out through my teeth. Zach put his head down, his eyes lowering in apology.

Brennan just brushed it off, moving on with the more important things relevant to the case. "You said you had something else to show me?"

* * *

 **A/N: Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	3. The Titan on the Tracks, Part Three

One of the few places I hadn't seen Saroyan yet was the lab Hodgins liked to declare himself the king of. In this lab, the rules were simple: don't touch if you don't understand, the insects are not pets, and defer to the king. In this hierarchy, Zach was a knight, Brennan was a nobility, Booth was a visiting royal, Angela was a dame, I was the princess (due to my nickname, I presumed), and the other employees were the loyal serfs.

I liked being the princess of the land. I was a bit spoiled. The lab had become a fun place to be because of the company I usually got from Hodgins and/or Zach, the educational aspect which I liked more than I let on, and the general trust that was extended to me from the beginning to handle Hodgins' equipment and help him with forensic measures. I proved myself aptly to him at the beginning, especially with my understanding of chemical compounds.

The return to the feudal era this time was for the purpose of seeing an experiment Hodgins and Zach had decided to run… for purely forensic case-solving purposes, of course.

"In a car fire, gasoline ignites at twenty-eight degrees Celsius and rises to a temperature of twenty-two hundred degrees." Zach informed, giving the expository speech so that we would understand the background behind what we were seeing.

Brennan, Hodgins, Zach, and I all had on clear, thick white glasses for safety, though we were watching what looked uncomfortably like a human body being roasted in a glass tank in front of us, fire contained safely and controlled easily and at a second's notice by the controls and orders being fed into the machine. The fleshy part of the body looked pink and cooked like a hot dog, while the bones hadn't yet scorched.

"If the gas tank were full at the time of impact, the fire should have burned for approximately twenty minutes without intervention." Hodgins added. I trusted his math and didn't usually question how he came up with his results anymore. Unfortunately for this experiment, we didn't have a precise time for how long it had been burning before the fire department had intervened.

What looked like it was supposed to be a muscle melted off of the rest of the propped upright body and fell to the grated mesh net underneath. The fire rose from that spot as well as it turned darker, cooking faster with more surface area to the volume.

Zach smiled. If I didn't know it was for the sake of the experiment, I'd have been concerned.

Brennan shook her head. She approves of the desire to run experiments; even when there's a risk, she encourages scientific learning and inquiry, and she likes to let us have our fun when we can in the meantime. Still, she wasn't usually the most involved with it. It used to be just Hodgins and Zach's thing, but when they discovered that I knew what Dermestidae were, I became Xena: Warrior Princess and undisputed Queen of the Lab to Hodgins' King. This was mainly because I was the only female in our triad of nerdy scientists who like to damage things with the excuse of casework.

"Tell me that's not a real skeleton." She said, concerned with the realism it displayed.

"No," Zach answered quickly. He, like Brennan, prized the integrity of evidence and human remains. Pig remains, though… those were totally okay to send through a wood chipper. "We made him out of calcium phosphate and hydroxyapatite."

"And spam," Hodgins added with a grin and a little giggle.

"Twenty minutes…" Zach raised his right arm to see his watch, set on its stopwatch mode via a button on the side. "Now," he called when it hit. Hodgins pressed his fingertips against the edges of the dial on the controls and significantly lowered the flames. They mostly put themselves out, given how they were being manufactured; see, the way the tank was designed made it like one big lighter, and when you release the pressure on the trigger of a lighter, the access to the fluid is cut off and the flames extinguish on their own.

"It's still a significant amount of spam," Brennan noted, not sounding too convinced. The spam was supposed to mimic the burning of the flesh and tissues, yet by the time we'd gotten to the body, most of the flesh had been eaten away by the fire.

"According to the fire department report, the car burned for forty minutes, and it still took four minutes to put out." Hodgins looked intently at the remains of his spam creation.

"Which means there had to have been extra fuel to burn it longer and hotter," I concluded. That was how the experiments were justified; no matter how silly they seem, we can still make observations and draw conclusions, which are the foundations of the scientific method.

Brennan looked away from the body and slid her safety glasses off of her nose now that the fire was out. "And the extra glass you found?" She asked while running her fingers thoughtfully along the plastic legs. The lab safety glasses didn't fold up.

"Five-gallon Mason jars."

"Six of them," Zach specified.

"Filled with gasoline," she guessed.

Hodgins shrugged. "That or moonshine." He turned the machine back on and, though it took a few seconds for the flames to pick up again, they gradually increased in vigor to see how much of a difference there was between our results and the crime scene.

"So either someone intended to make the fire that much more destructive, or they had originally planned on getting stupid drunk." I nodded slowly. Liquor was actually a very potent accelerant, but in the spirit of being the sarcastic presence of the lab, I kept to being sarcastic and humorous even when the conversation began to go down dark paths. This made the implications of murder and body disposal much more evident.

 _Click, click._

I tensed my jaw, grinding my teeth. The sound of high heels – when not accompanied by Angela's familiar and kind voice – was beginning to create a Pavlovian response of anger and annoyance.

 _I just wanted one place safe,_ I thought, drawing my shoulders up slightly. All of these great, comforting places were being remarked as risky territory as Saroyan made her presence known, intruding all over the Jeffersonian. I could probably go kill time in the paleontology department with Zach's on-again off-again hook up, Naomi, and Saroyan would likely turn up sooner or later.

"Why does the whole lab smell like a luau?" She asked, her voice not as amused as it was almost knowingly accusatory, prepared to inflict blame on whoever looked the most guilty. She wasn't wrong, though. Because spam is actually a food product, it smelled like we were cooking up some meat for lunch.

I turned to the right to see her entering the lab, heels coming over the threshold. I smiled sarcastically and raised my hand in a halfhearted wave. _"Aloha, haole._ " I didn't know much Hawaiian – really only picked up a couple phrases because of television – but I remembered how to say that.

 _Haole_ literally meant "person who isn't Hawaiian," but, more often, it was used to say "intruder." Now I just have to hope she doesn't speak Hawaiian. She started it, with the luau comment.

She smiled at me politely. "We speak English in this lab, please." There was a tightness to the request that made it less of a request and more of a disguised command. I wanted to reply in any other language. She doesn't need to know what I'm saying. If I'm not saying it in English, it's obviously not meant for her to hear.

As I became mulishly stubborn and resigned myself to keeping my mouth shut for as long as I could stand, Brennan actually answered the proposed question. "Zach and Hodgins are proving there was extra accelerant in Lynch's vehicle."

Cocking her head none-too-subtly towards the slowly roasting fake body, the pathologist inquired, "Using what medium?"

Sensing trouble brewing, Brennan glanced at me. I took in a deep breath and forced a terse smile that I'm sure no one saw through. She looked back to Saroyan as she realized I was having enough trouble holding my tongue, let alone using it politely. "Artificial bone covered with spam."

Saroyan nodded and exhaled deeply, crossing her arms and folding her hands in front of her. She looked down towards the toes of her shoes. "Turn this off," she ordered calmly.

 _What?_ Amazed, wondering if I had possibly heard that right, I looked to Saroyan suddenly in shock that I was incredibly glad that she didn't see. Hodgins, Zach, and Brennan all had similar reactions. We were having fun, yes, but we were doing our jobs in a reasonable and well-justified manner for the sake of accuracy and evidence! Was she really going to take half of the purpose of the lab away, too?

Hodgins turned his head to look at Brennan, sorrowfully surprised that his new boss was seemingly turning on him. Brennan, who used to be the main authority of the Medico-Legal lab, looked irritated, lips pursed and eyes maddened, but she nodded assent, telling him to listen to what Saroyan had said. Reluctantly, he turned the dial all the way to the side until the fire in the tank was shut off completely. Saroyan waited until the soft noises had entirely faded with the last of the flames.

"Why wasn't I told about this?" She asked. Underneath the calm and even level of her imperious question, it sounded like there was a storm brewing. She didn't seem like the kind to have an explosive temper, so I figured that it would start raining any minute. Fitting, considering she'd just put our fire out.

Brennan laughed at the question, along with the implied assumption that all of our actions had to be run past her first. "I encourage independent inquiry." It also involved her having implicit trust in Zach, Hodgins, and, amazingly enough, myself. Hell, we could probably take explosive chemicals outside and start using them to fire off bottle rockets and she'd be cool with it, if a little exasperated, as long as we could somehow tie it to the case.

Saroyan looked up again and met eyes with Brennan, laying down her new law sternly. "Your encouragement does not signify my authorization," she chastened. "Unauthorized experiments in forensics will get you fired. If it happens again, I will take action. Am I clear? And I'm from New York," she added, turning her warning glare to me. "Which means that I will take New York action. Am I clear?"

I got what she meant – I mean, I'd lived in New York for a short time, and I'd say I understood the downfalls and danger of the city more than she did, considering my status as a nine-eleven survivor – but I still narrowed my eyes, daring her to edify exactly what she was saying.

I didn't have to, because Brennan didn't get what she meant the way I did. "Not at all," she denied, shaking her head.

I spared a look at Hodgins and Zach. The entomologist – and now the undermined king – was not at all happy, but he didn't look too broken hearted about it. Zach, on the other hand, looked absolutely petrified.

"… I'm from Michigan," he whispered, pathetic and terrified. I shook my head at him. The poor guy.

Hodgins smirked and he clapped his hand onto Zach's shoulder. The intern rocked with the motion. "Dr. Saroyan means she'll make us watch musical theater," he explained, shooting a look back at his boss. I certainly didn't miss that he hadn't called her 'Cam' that time; I don't think she did, either, judging by the almost disappointed frown on her face.

"Wrong New York. I'm more from the get-mugged-in-broad-daylight tradition." Hodgins still wasn't impressed, but Zach looked even worse off. He was giving Puss in Boots a run for his money (mice?) with the puppy dog eyes that he was unknowingly enacting. … I was a little disappointed with myself for the _Shrek_ reference, but that's what I get for letting Booth encourage me to watch a movie with Parker and himself.

"But…" Zach whimpered in objection. When Saroyan looked at him again, he looked so unsure of himself it almost made me mad at Saroyan all over again. Zach was, unfortunately, fairly easily intimidated; if I hadn't approached him with the intention of playing nice, I doubted he would have been comfortable near me afterwards with how abrasive I tended to be. I was not okay with Saroyan scaring someone I considered mine. "We're Hodge-Podge and Zacharoni."

"And," Brennan added her voice in, trying to protect them. "They work for me."

Saroyan looked to the ceiling for a few seconds, probably counting to herself in her head. "You know, what I'd really like to do here is enjoy a meeting of the minds." _Then stop stifling ours!_ "But, if you insist on an organizational pyramid, I _will_ be at the top."

 _We don't need a hierarchy!_ I regretted making the comparison of Hodgins' lab to a feudalist hierarchy now that Saroyan had managed to turn it into a real one. _We were working perfectly before you came along,_ I thought viciously.

I could still hear her shoes and she hadn't gotten too far away from the office before I just couldn't hold it in anymore, and I burst. At least I maintained my resolve to do so in another language.

 _"_ _Cualesquiera otras libertades que le gustaria llevar, mientras que_ _ella está_ _en él?_ _!"_

I thought that angrily asking if there were any other freedoms she'd like to take away from us would be a good way to vent some frustration, until, less than two seconds later, I got a reply. From Saroyan.

 _"_ _Escuché eso!"_ She chimed from down the hall, not even pausing in her footsteps.

My eyes went wide and I glowered. While Brennan was alarmed and Zach frozen in place, Hodgins looked from the doorway to me. No one else understood our exchange, but it wasn't hard to figure out the basic idea that I'd said something rude and she'd pretty much responded with an overly bright "I heard that!"

 _"_ _Joder, ella habla Español!"_

My mouth shocked Saroyan so badly that her heels paused in their click-click-clicking away from the lab. In English, she reproachfully called, "Language!"

* * *

My lunch was delivered to me across the bar counter at the Royal Diner, a grilled cheese sandwich cut diagonally into two and half a plate of French fries. I reached for the ketchup bottle to my left while Booth laughed about the scientific process Brennan and I had been explaining.

"Spam?" He laughed out loud when she got to the part about how the composition of the dummy was meant to have a reaction to fire accurately comparable to human flesh.

Brennan nodded and went on, taking the coffee that was given to her by the waitress. "There were mason jars in the backseat, intended to break when the train hit."

Still snickering, Booth tried to hide his mouth behind his hand. "And they got this with spam?"

"Yeah," Brennan confirmed for a second time, not understanding why it was funny. Even I didn't get this one. "Spam."

"Mm-hmm. And Cam, she got all bent out of shape?"

"She wants us to authorize all experiments," Brennan muttered, glowering at the table. Her eyes softened when they landed on her mug and she blew over the rim, sending the steam blowing away from her.

Booth looked a little bit exasperated for a second, but wiped it from his face before Brennan could see and moved on before I could comment. "Great. You know, Zach and Hodgins, they do an experiment with fake bones in spam-"

Impatiently, Brennan tapped her foot against the intersecting bar between the front legs of the bar stool. "What is your spam fixation?" She asked, annoyed.

Booth just kept going, not wanting to explain. "-Defense lawyer hears spam, he makes a joke, and the jury laughs, and everything we get from the Jeffersonian is framed as goofy science from a bunch of squints with no connection to the real world." _Oh, yeah, none at all, except for higher education._ I hated when people dismissed others just because they sounded funny. That was how bullying started.

Brennan was equally insulted, but she still had the faith in people being rational and thinking things through, so she argued it. "That wouldn't happen."

"Oh, really," he scoffed, and raised an eyebrow. "And the time you dropped a dead monkey down the elevator shaft…?"

"No," she objected. "That was to show-" I imagined Hodgins impishly producing a monkey carcass from a cooler and Zach dropping down the dark elevator space with a pair of surgical tongs and started laughing in the middle of her sentence. Brennan looked to her left at me and started to smile affectionately when I dropped half of my sandwich back onto my plate and covered my mouth, trying to shut up. "… Okay," she conceded. "I take your point."

I didn't know when this had happened, so I had to assume it had been part of a case from before they met me. I was strangely jealous from the thought of them getting to drop animal corpses down elevator shafts. It sounded like the kind of crazy thing the Experimental Duo would get up to. At least for the next few months, I'd have the definite excuse to join in and keep it the Experimental Trio.

Booth nodded, proud of her for accepting it, and he shot me a playful wink for unintentionally helping him prove his point. I huffed and picked up my sandwich again. The cheese was melted to perfection, damn it, and he was distracting me from my lunch with funny stories.

"Cam's goal is a successful prosecution in a court of law."

"Same as mine and yours," Brennan reasoned, because if we all had the same goals, then why was there a conflict?

"Oh, _you're_ all about finding the truth," he corrected her. There was a difference between Brennan's and Cam's approach. Cam was more focused. She had more of a one-track mind for the cases; she wanted a suspect, she wanted incriminating evidence, and she wanted reasonable confidence that the prosecution would win. Brennan wanted evidence of all kinds, no matter where it led or who it made look bad. She wanted justice for the victims, but she didn't care nearly as much as Cam about politics or consider the aptitudes of civilian juries for not understanding key evidence.

Brennan looked at him for a long moment before she carefully said, bemused, "Okay, your _words_ say "good," but your _tone_ says "bad," so it's… confusing."

Booth gave her that one, knowing that sometimes things that weren't said outright were a little harder for her to understand, and he elaborated. "Cam knows that too _much_ truth is just as bad as too _little._ " Meaning that they shouldn't specify that the dummy was made of processed and canned meats. His cell phone started to ring. "Which is why she got the job," he informed, reaching into his jacket pocket to get it. He flipped it open while Brennan looked back at her coffee, thinking over the legitimacy of his claim. "Yeah, Booth."

Brennan's eyes widened and she looked up from her coffee suddenly, leaning over to Booth's personal space. "You know, Angela says that you and Cam had a sexual relationship. Does that affect your view of her?"

I choked on my sandwich. Damn it! Why was it so hard for me to eat my lunch today?!

"Patch me through," he told the person who had called him, then covered the receiver on the lower half of his phone with his hand and frowned at Brennan. " _Wildly_ out of line. Just so you know that." He took his hand off of the microphone and went back to listening. His body language stilled, while Brennan's apologetically backed out of his space and moved back over to her own allotment of countertop. "When?"

"You know," she tried again. I suppose she figured that since the topic had already been broached, it couldn't be too bad of an idea to finish it out. "Personal prerogative is at the heart of scientific inquiry."

"Bones!" He said stressfully, shoulders down. He waved her away. Brennan realized he wanted to have one conversation at the time and accepted that he wasn't going to dignify her question with a yes or no answer. She drank some coffee. He swallowed, staring ahead at the drink cooler that stored juice, milk, and bottled water. "Thanks for the notification."

With his mood significantly lower than it had been, he looked at his phone wearily and flipped it shut, then replaced it in his jacket, looking down at his watch and checking out the time. This time, even Brennan realized that something was wrong.

"What?" Brennan asked in concern. I pointed at her and then held up two fingers, seconding her question with my mouth full.

Booth hesitated, then turned around on the stool just to face her directly. "The man who was charged with… murdering your mother…" he started to say, wincing as he talked.

"The pig farmer," Brennan said, making a face as she said his name again. "Vince McVicar." She nodded to show she was paying attention.

Booth looked away from her, staring instead at her shoulder. "He was killed," he said quietly. "Today, at Alexandria Federal Holding Facility."

The sandwich I'd been eating no longer looked good, and I regretted eating as much of it as I had. I put down the second half and pushed the entire plate away from me, as well as the iced glass of orange juice. I wiped my fingers on the napkin and then set my hands in my lap, trying to decide if I needed to drink something or if doing so would just make me queasy.

Vince McVicar was a hitman we had arrested in the case that culminated in the discovery of the Kirklands' bodies – or what remained of them, rather – and Brennan taking a vacation when Goodman suggested it. McVicar had been in Witness Protection for testifying against other criminals in order to stop his own prison sentencing, but the U.S. Marshalls had neutralized their deal with him when we provided them with evidence that he had murdered at least three people that we knew of after the deal was made. His trial had yet to take place, but he had been kept in a holding station near the city in anticipation of it, which was supposed to happen after a judge spoke with Booth, Russ, Brennan and I independently – Booth as the arresting officer, the Brennan siblings and I as the family of his victims.

I had always thought that the Kirklands had just abandoned me, and learning that they had run away – for fear for their lives, to protect Aaron and I, or both – had forced me to change the way I viewed them. McVicar might even be the reason that Aaron had joined the U.S. Armed Forces. I had assumed it was because he didn't want to deal with me anymore, but for all I knew, he had run for the same reasons that his parents had. At least he had had the forethought to leave me enough money until I could get a job that paid enough for the cheapest living arrangements that I could afford, even if I had to forge his signature on some documents that a lazy landlord didn't care to authenticate.

McVicar hadn't quite taken the place of Howard Epps in my nightmares, but he had come pretty close. He was controlled, I suppose, and he had been in my house. That made him scarier than Epps had ever seemed in some ways, but much more predictable in others.

I breathed out, hearing Booth say my name softly to see if I was okay. I decided not to drink or eat anything else and opened my eyes, not knowing when I had closed them. The first thing I did next was to check on Brennan. She had turned to look at the table, her head down and her elbows up, leaning onto the bar. Her breath came shakily.

"I don't…" she stopped and kept her head down. If I were anyone else, I'd have put my hand on her shoulder as an anchor, but I didn't think at the moment I could handle anyone touching me, even Parker.

She picked her head up and pushed her hair behind her ears so that it was out of her face, but I saw the shine of tears in her eyes and I felt even worse. I wasn't the only person who had lost people to the psychopath. With him dead, I might never know what the hell the Kirklands had done to deserve being targets of a hitman, but she might never find her father. His motives for harming dead people didn't matter as much as finding someone who was still alive.

"He was the only connection to my father." Brennan said, her voice surprisingly even. She swiped under her eyes, brushing away tears before they could fall and leave tear tracks. "His trial was going to be my…" Rubbing her eyes again and running her hands through her hair again, she held her hands over her face and breathed, feeling her breath on her palms. "How am I ever going to find out what really happened?"

I talked a big game about how if we'd found out about her mom, we could find out about her dad, but with our one feasible lead in a morgue somewhere, that seemed a lot less like determination and more like senseless platitudes. I didn't say anything, but looked at Booth and then to Brennan, subtly asking him to help her while I tried to get a hold of myself.

* * *

Angela took the facial markers that Zach gave her with the skull and constructed a holographic display of who the skull belonged to. The five of us – Booth, Brennan, Angela, Saroyan, and myself – all looked for a long time at the projection before anyone spoke. Booth tried, but he lost his voice and closed his mouth with nothing to say.

"That's not Warren Lynch." Saroyan finally said, stating what was rather obvious.

The similarities between this skull and our murder victim was their race and sex, and it ended there. This was a guy at least ten years younger, with blonde hair (although that was just Angela's guess), and looked too thin. The cheekbones were too high and the muscle tissue in the cheeks too shallow.

"How accurate is this thing?" Saroyan asked, turning to Angela to inquire about her machine.

Brennan looked through the golden-orange glow at Saroyan and sternly defended the technology in question. "It's not the machine that's accurate, it's _Angela._ And she's _good."_

Two seconds passed.

"That is _not_ Warren Lynch," Saroyan repeated more insistently, pointing at the face as if someone was disagreeing with her.

Angela held her tablet to her stomach. "Hey, Zach provided a skull and this is the face that goes with it." She shrugged her shoulders like she didn't care, but I knew it had to be bothering her more than she let on that the murder victim and the face she reconstructed didn't match. No matter what she said to Saroyan, she'd almost definitely redo the markers to see if the end result was the same.

Booth very uncomfortably coughed. "Could it be the wrong skull?"

Brennan glared at him for even suggesting her intern screwed up that badly. "Zach doesn't make that kind of mistake," she stuck up for him. "He's _also_ very good."

Saroyan shook her head and held out a hand to stop the speculation on whose mistake it was. "What about the dental records?" She asked, thinking of other ways to confirm the identity.

Angela released her lower lip from the grasp of her teeth. "I'll check 'em for tampering," she promised, though she didn't sound very enthusiastic about the prospect.

Booth scratched his hand through his hair. "So you're certain that the body in the car…?" He trailed off as if he didn't even want to consider saying it out loud himself, thinking it would jinx it or something.

Brennan saved him the trouble and did it for him. "Is _not_ Warren Lynch," she confirmed fairly confidently. The dentals may have been wrong; it was unlikely, but given the experience and talent that both Angela and Zach had, it was more likely than that their facial reconstruction had gotten such radically incorrect results. "Absolutely certain."

* * *

We found out from Angela a few hours after the disastrous facial recognition results that the dental records had, in fact, been falsified. The legalized records had been re-recorded using some expertly-filmed alphanumeric bar codes. However that worked. I hadn't gotten a full run-down on the process.

Still, while we now knew how the victim's identity had been faked, there were other questions we still didn't have answers to, including the victim's real identity and what had happened to the actual Warren Lynch. Booth, Brennan, and I hid out in Brennan's smaller, less conspicuous silver car in the neighborhood where I used to live. The seats were leaned back and I had moved to the middle of the backseat so that I still had leg room, and while the adults were leaning back, I was leaning forward. We were all trying to be harder to see so that we were stealthy.

"Metro cops say that the guy pushing the Mexican heroin laced with fentanyl is Eddie Bean." After contacting the narcotics unit to let them know what was going on, Booth had wanted to collect either Brennan or myself for a stakeout so he wouldn't be lonely. Neither of us had been on a stakeout like this before, so we both happily accompanied him. "Young guy, bald-headed, five-five, one forty-five pounds."

"Hm." I had my legs spread out, one under each of the reclined seats, and I had my elbows in front of me on the compartment between the seats. I was really liking the blazer; I'd been unsure if I really wanted to let Angela convince me to try less oversized clothing, but the blazers I'd gotten were comfortable and – not to be vain or anything – fit really well, even when they were snugly pulling across my back. "Short guy. Small stature. Shouldn't be hard to take out in a fight." Of course, the clothes didn't change my attitudes or approach. The dealer was shorter than me and though he weighed more, I didn't think it would be a problem.

Brennan tried to sit up, craning her neck and attempting to see further out the windshield. Booth put his arm over her torso and pushed her back down, giving her a scolding look for letting herself get visible.

She reclined again, but shoved his arm away from her reproachfully. "You know, if drugs were legalized, they could be dispensed from clean, safe, _controlled_ outlets by trained personnel. Not in alleyways by criminals."

"Yeah. Right." I got the impression that, as he looked away, Booth rolled his eyes.

"She's not wrong," I pointed out. However, neither of them were considering the points in each other's opinions. While in Brennan's ideal world, drugs could be controlled and injections safer, and there be less of a stigma to those who use them, it didn't account for the poor judgment that came with addiction, the dishonest root of drug problems, and the idea that making it condonable supported that drugs were a good thing, which would probably lead to a lot more people trying them and growing a dependency. No matter how well it was handled, addictions were not good. "But I think you're both discounting that there are a lot of variables. Booth, you're forgetting about the practical values that Dr. Brennan is thinking about, while Dr. Brennan, you're forgetting that people can be notoriously unreliable when their judgment is clouded."

"Heh," Booth chuckled. "Kind of like when you were on the Oxycodone."

Scowling, I looked down. The Oxycodone had made me pretty easy to get along with for the first couple of days after coming to Brennan's apartment, especially in the mornings, when I was half-asleep anyway. The time Booth was referring to was when my judgment had been bad and I'd thought that it would be a great idea to sleep upside down on the couch. I even got a pillow and blanket for it. He had taken pictures. When I'd woken up, I had a killer headache.

Some short guy with his hands shoved in the pockets of a brown faux-leather jacket looked to our car quickly before going over it. He looked like he fit the description, and these were his known stomping grounds. Brennan immediately straightened. "Hey, that's our guy!"

She started to reach for the door handle to pop open the door and get out of the car, but Booth hurriedly dissuaded her.

"No, no, sh!" He put a finger over his lips in emphasis. Bemused, Brennan looked back at him from the window, taking her eyes off of the man who didn't know he was being watched. "What we've gotta do is wait until he deals, catch him in the act."

"We wait?" Outside, Eddie leaned up against the brick side of a building by the alley to our left and across the street. He looked down the darker alley but then rocked his head against the wall, waiting for someone. "For how long?"

Booth sighed and shifted, settling down in the chair. He crossed his arms and used them as a pillow behind his head. "However long it takes," he declared.

Brennan sank back in grudgingly and crossed her arms over her stomach. "Well… what do we do, while we… wait?" She sounded skeptical, as if she couldn't believe that we could see the man, but we had to keep still in the car for an indefinite amount of time.

"This is a stakeout," he said, turning his head to look at her with a frown. "We converse," he explained when she looked at him, clueless what she was supposed to get from the reminder. He was forgetting that Brennan didn't have a television on which to watch cop shows, and therefore didn't know what typical stakeout behavior was.

"Well, I tried to initiate conversation about the drug war, but…" _But you weren't receptive,_ she meant to finish, but she trailed off before she said it. That made it a little bit better, I guess.

Booth groaned. "Oh, God…" _This is going to be stressful,_ I predicted, mentally preparing myself to be a mediator. It's not a role I've ever done a good job in, but somehow it was the role I played seventy percent of the time when talking with these two. "Fine. You know what, let's talk about something we're _not_ going to argue about."

After he said that, instead of offering a suggestion for what to speak about, he went quiet. Brennan didn't say anything, either, but she seemed to be in thought.

"So…" I said, breaking the uncomfortably tense silence that had descended in the car. "What is there that you're not going to argue about, that we're all knowledgeable enough to have a decent conversation about?" Neither of the adults answered. Brennan paused, started to open her mouth to say something, and then closed it again, looking down. I sighed, letting a long whoosh of air out of my mouth. "Great."

There should have been a clock in there so that we could hear the seconds ticking by out loud as awkwardly as I could in my head. I could have a conversation with Booth, or I could have a conversation with Brennan; but apparently we couldn't all have a conversation with each other, which spoke to a strong necessity of finding some common interests.

I wondered if they'd like _Supernatural._ Then Brennan, Booth, Zach, and I could all discuss the show. Between the theological implications and context and the badassery of the characters, there would at least be something each of us could participate in. I was kinda desperate for a way to relieve the silence and I was two minutes away from resorting to nerdy science jokes.

"Have either of you visited your parents' grave?" Booth asked quietly, because of the stakeout and out of respect for the sensitive topic.

He must've thought it was sensitive, anyway; Brennan had since adjusted, and I had processed it not long after it had happened. I was sad that we now had three tombstones in the cemetery that we had personal connections to, but I had done all about it that I could, aside from finding Aaron and telling him, but I wasn't sure I was emotionally ready to do that yet. Either he had been chased away by McVicar, just like his parents, or he had voluntarily packed his bags and left. Which was worse?

"Not since the funerals," Brennan replied not as quietly.

"Same here," I responded.

Although she hadn't known the Kirklands and I hadn't known Christine, we'd each gone to both funerals, and the cemetery had plotted them beside each other, both because of timing and because of space. We were roommates and friends; I'd gone to her mother's both for her and for respect for Christine, and I suspected she may have gone to my parents' for the same reason.

"Really?" Booth asked, getting that it wasn't as heartbreaking as it could have been and speaking a touch louder.

"Why would I?" She asked, wondering what she was missing.

"Well, you know, to connect."

"Um, it's… pretty hard to connect with a corpse kept six feet under the ground," I said apologetically. I understood that he got comfort from standing by someone's grave, but I didn't. I liked what the cemetery stood for, but I didn't like to go visit. I don't have a religion. To me, when someone dies, they're gone, just like that. The heart stops beating, the synapses stop firing, and the person ceases to exist. There's no debate over Heaven or Hell, or the desire to connect with the imprint they left. All I get when I go to the cemetery is sadness because I remember that I'm standing above the decomposing remains.

"Your idea of gaining emotional closure from visiting the graves of deceased loved ones is rooted in the belief of being able to communicate with them somehow and being close to them, like they know you're there." Booth blinked. Brennan continued. If he had known that this would incite an unnecessary explanation from Brennan, I doubted he'd have mentioned it in the first place. "That belief relies on the principles of people going to Heaven after an earthly death. For Atheists such as ourselves, the notion holds no meaning, and therefore the only emotions we'd gain from visiting the gravesites would be negative, because they're dead."

 _Oh, no._ "I did _not_ mean to make this about religion," I swore. I had no qualms with religion; I didn't have it, but I accepted and appreciated that others did, Booth included. Brennan respects it, but she doesn't understand why Booth can get touchy about certain comments, so usually when religion comes up, it… doesn't end well.

"Fine. You know what? Forget it." Booth crossed his arms and stared at the windshield, focusing on Eddie.

 _"_ _Dead,"_ Brennan repeated, leaning towards him. I leaned back so that she could without getting between them. "As in, _gone from this world."_

At least I knew where this conversation went awry. I leaned forward and hid my face in my hands.

"Ex-… excuse me?" Brennan watched Booth attentively, putting all of her focus to him to make up for unintentionally offending him. "I'm curious," she continued, trying to engage him in discussion again. "When you talk to the headstone, what do you say?"

I guess that she was trying to understand made it worth the potential exasperation he expected to face again. Booth looked away from Eddie and to Brennan, indulging her. "It _looks_ like I'm talking to the headstone, but what I'm _really_ saying is…" he caught a look at her face; earnest and inquisitive, but not with any sort of dawning realization. He sighed. "Forget about where the words are aimed. What I _say_ is that I remember them."

Her frown deepened. "They can't hear you," she reminded him, confused why he'd want to assure anyone of this once they were dead and unable to hear, let alone _care._ "Because they're _dead."_

He shook his head and put on a higher voice to tease. "My mouth moves, words come out…" he mimed with his hand that he was speaking and leaned towards Brennan. I leaned further back to stay out of the way. "But none seem to get across the drawbridge to the princess I know who waits within."

As they got along, I laughed. With Booth making an effort not to take it so personally, it was a much more relaxing stakeout. "At least this particular princess is more kick-ass than any Disney version," I said as if in placation. Brennan just looked over the shoulder of the passenger's seat to me and alternated between looking at Booth and I, trying to figure out what she missed. I looked up to the windshield casually, not even intending to check out the druggie again, but ended up catching the goings-on across the street. Eddie was dragging something out of his jacket pocket but kept it low and out of sight. Another man, taller and lankier, had his back to us and was half hidden in the alley. "Hey, is it just me, or does that look shady?"

Booth's attention snapped back to what we were _supposed_ to be doing and he unbuckled his seatbelt. "We're on," he said more harshly as Brennan got the hint and jumped out of the car. I practically flew over the back seat and out, well-practiced at leaving the SUV in a hurry.

"What princess?" Brennan asked, still frustrated, while Booth and I sprinted across the street to the alley.

"Whoa, hey!"

"Hey! Oh…"

The two drug comrades noticed us before we reached the alley. One of them dropped whatever he'd been holding and shoved it back to Eddie and took off down the alley; I was irritated, but knew that it wasn't important that we went after him. Eddie raised his arm up towards his face and opened his mouth. I guessed he was swallowing the evidence proving he had the drugs.

I grabbed his arm, skidding as I turned my feet to the side. My agility was more than a match for him, because he wasn't in the greatest shape. I grabbed his arm firmly and dug my fingers into flesh to bruise, and when he turned his head to look at me, I slammed my fist into the side of his face, stunning him.

 _Hey, look at that, more or less police-sanctioned assault!_

Booth took the man away from me, shoving him down onto the dirty alley ground with the light from the headlights of our car. He yanked back the collar of the heavier jacket and slipped his hand over the dealer's throat, pressing against his neck hard.

"Pockets," Booth ordered either Brennan or I – whoever cared to get close enough to do so faster, just to make sure that the guy couldn't pull a fast one. "Watch out for needles," he added when I dropped to my knees on the other side and started patting down his jeans' pockets.

Brennan stayed standing, skeptically watching the proceedings from the moral high ground. "Don't you have to read him his rights before you strangle him?" She asked Booth suspiciously while I found a bulge in the pocket. I pressed against the lower edge and pushed it out of the slip in his pants without having to blindly reach inside, and then picked up the hypodermic needle when it fell onto the floor next to him.

"Ruin the fun, why don't you?" I asked Brennan, only half sarcastic, and then held up the syringe to show Booth what he'd had. "Ooh."

Eddie made an indignant, raspy sort of choking sound, which was about as loquacious as he could be in the current position, and I looked back down to acknowledge his sentience.

"You should really have stuff to sterilize this," I lectured, holding it with my index and middle fingers on the sides and my thumb against the depressor. "You know you can get H.I.V. from unclean needles, right?"

"Along with a large plethora of other harmful diseases and bacteria," the anthropologist added helpfully over my shoulder. The difference was that I was lecturing to be patronizing and she was scolding to try to be helpful and preserve his health. Such vastly different motivations for the same action.

"You know, I had to hold his throat so he wouldn't swallow the evidence, alright?" Booth understandably sounded as if half-choking a drug dealer wasn't his idea of a fun night. He held a finger threateningly in front of Eddie's face. "If you bite me, I will _squeeze_ your little pinhead off. Okay?"

I rolled my eyes and tossed the syringe over towards the side of a rusting dumpster while Booth gave the insults. Eddie had his jaw open to try to forcibly inhale more air, and Booth reached to the back of his throat. Eddie jerked, reflexively gagging, while the F.B.I. agent pinched the packet he tried to swallow and forcibly dragged it up his throat. It was a condom with the end tied off, filled with a crushed whitish powder.

"You shouldn't swallow heroin," Brennan advised mildly where she stood to the side. "It's dangerous."

Something told me that safety wasn't a drug dealer's first concern. "And if that's how you think condoms are _supposed_ to be used, then you're doing it wrong."

"Can we just ask about the murderer instead of doing the whole health lecture?" Booth demanded, annoyed.

Booth handed the drug condom over. I sighed and held the end where it was tied off, a little slick with the man's spit, and contented myself with the reminder that I didn't have any open wounds. This was _not_ the most glorious part of my job. The former sniper picked Eddie up off of the ground heftily by the collar of the thick winter jacket and threw him off in the direction of the brick wall to the left, then made a big deal out of brushing off his clothes in disgust. I stepped up while Eddie was dazed and gagging and shoved my left forearm across his chest, pinning him to the wall with the heroin in my other hand.

It really wasn't the drugs that bothered me, or that it was a condom, as much as it was that the idiot had had it in his mouth. Spit-swapping should be withheld for only during times of C.P.R. and voluntary kissing. Drugs are everywhere, and I've seen my fair share of them, what with my gloomy history and previous neighborhood, and what the hell's the big deal about getting icked out by condoms? They're latex, like balloons, but people don't squeal in disgust when they see balloons.

Booth rolled his shoulders back. "I'm going to ask you a question, okay? You answer, you walk away. You don't answer…" he trailed off threateningly.

Eddie swallowed, his Adam's apple standing out in his throat. "You book me," he rasped, glaring at Booth over my shoulder. He sounded very much like someone who'd been held in a stranglehold. "I get sick." Some cops like to punish drug users by locking them up and making them quit cold for a while, which led to symptoms of withdrawal that were unpleasant to be around, but even worse for the sufferers. "I know the drill."

Seeing as that didn't seem like a very strong incentive to him, I pressed harder, pushing weight into my elbow and digging my arm harder into his sternum. Then I let myself laugh a little.

"Hah! No, that's not how I work." I pressed harder to demand his attention and his eyes snapped from Booth to me. His pupils were wrong and his eyes were having a harder time focusing than they should have been, thanks to his using. "Ever seen the movie _Lucy?_ " I asked, mostly rhetorically, because I had no intention of giving him the opportunity to respond to me. "Well, if you don't answer, I will stuff this back down your throat. You'll have to either risk overdosing with every passing minute, or go to a hospital to have it taken out of your body before it can be ruptured." I dangled the condom full of heroin powder in front of his face tauntingly. "Since every movement could risk jarring it in _just the right way_ – it's not a risk you wanna take. Capisc?"

His eyes locked on the heroin with a spark of nervousness. He nodded uncomfortably, back of his head grinding against the rough bricks behind him and screwing with his already untidy hair.

"Good," I said calmly, rewarding him with a lessening of the weight being pushed into his chest. I kept my arm in front of him just in case. "Now, you sold heroin from a Mexican shipment to a tall man. He probably wore a lot of jewelry, nice clothes, intimidating, over a foot taller than you."

"Over six and a half feet tall," Booth put in to be more descriptive. Standing at over just six feet himself, he put a hand up over his head, elbow almost level with his forehead. "Like, up here."

"Uh…" Unintelligently, Eddie stuttered, looking up at Booth's hand and then down at eye-level, which happened to be about at my nose. He blinked rapidly. "Nobody I know." He looked away from me and to the ground, pressing his knuckles against the wall behind him.

I recognized a tell when I saw it, and I adjusted my attitude, casually leaning against him to crush his chest again. "You sure about that, sweetheart?" He nodded too quickly with his eyes going wide. "I'm pretty sure Lucy died at the end of the movie," I hinted.

"Ray," he croaked, after looking at Brennan and realizing that neither of the adults were exactly going to stop me. They had to know I wouldn't actually take it that far, but I wasn't above making the threats, either.

"Ray," Booth repeated, catching the name like a dog with a bone. "Tell me more about Ray."

The druggie struggled weakly against the weight I was shoving against him with, but gave up quickly. "Everybody knows him down here, man, he's a long-time customer." He skipped the "U" in "customer" and slurred. I pursed my lips and looked over my shoulder at Booth, offering a polite smile as if I wasn't visible by artificial, weak streetlights, half-choking a man while threatening him with heroin overdose.

Brennan shifted curiously, holding her arms close to her body. This was really a disgusting alley, and I couldn't blame her for trying to keep herself together and in the relative center, where people walked and most of the trash was thrown out of the path. "When was the last time you saw him?"

"Bought a stick of dynamite about three days ago."

Brennan looked honestly alarmed when she heard this and looked anxiously at Booth. I leaned back towards her and pointed at Eddie calmly. "It's a mix of cocaine and heroin," I explained for her, then turned back to the annoying little junkie. "Was that so hard?" I pushed the heroin-condom into the thick and deep pockets of his jeans. "Like I said, get some clean needles," I said, giving him a shove and roughly patting his shoulder as I stepped away.

Booth wiped his fingers on his pants and threw an irritated scowl towards Eddie. I did the same thing, getting rid of the traces of the heroin, spit, and latex that might have been on my hand. I would've made a joke about it being another check off of my bucket list, but… okay, no, there was nothing about the situation that could be construed as anything I could possibly have on a list of things to do before I die.

I heard the crunching from two pairs of shoes, but the third shadow that belonged to Brennan hung back. Eddie stayed panting, leaning backwards while the wall supported his weight. Her voice, quiet, drifted forwards so that I could hear.

"I feel like I should alert you… there's an additive in this heroin that causes overdoses."

I sighed. There was a component in all drugs that could cause overdoses; and it was the same component that had people using it. The fentanyl was just more dangerous, like hiding a razor in a candy of slow-acting poison. Still, I couldn't fault her for trying to warn him, and it hadn't ceased to amaze me how someone like her, who saw so much more murder than I had, was still warmer and more willing to fight useless uphill battles than I was.

She joined Booth and I as we were crossing the street to get back to the car. A breeze was blowing, but it wasn't blocked by the buildings the way it had been in the alley. I crossed my arms over my front and pulled tighter on my jacket, missing the heavy, thick layers I used to wear for cost and practicality. Angela talked me into these lighter jackets and blazers, and nights like these, I almost regretted not putting my foot down.

"We should warn the addicts," Brennan fretted to Booth compassionately, catching up to us with fast-clicking heels.

"Yeah…" Booth agreed distractedly, taking out his phone from his pocket. The screen was lit up brightly and cast new artificial lighting on his face. He was frowning and exasperated. "Like they do on a pack of cigarettes." He accepted the call and held it to his ear. "Booth." Holding the phone between his ear and his shoulder, he dug out his car keys and unlocked the car remotely. The headlights blinked and the door mechanisms shuddered up. "When? … Thanks."

His voice changed as he hung up the phone, and instead of getting into the car, Brennan and I both looked at him to see what the news was. The way he held himself had changed, and he stared down at the phone in a mix of emotions, mostly centering on confusion and anger.

"What?" Brennan asked. I held my breath – what if it was something as bad as it was last time? What if it was something about McVicar, or the man who had killed him?

The F.B.I. agent looked up at the anthropologist. When he wasn't looking down at his phone, his face was clearer to see, and it was more evident that confusion was the primary emotion. "They found Warren Lynch," he said, holding up the phone as if offering proof.

* * *

We couldn't talk to Lynch in an interrogation room, but it wasn't because of his lawyers. We also didn't have to go see his body in a morgue, but it wasn't because of his certificate of full health. We had to go to a hospital – the same hospital Amy was in, incidentally. Warren Lynch had been brought in as a John Doe found badly beaten by the side of a road and had been admitted to the hospital's I.C.U.. Dental records had brought back his identity, and authorities had been notified.

A nurse on call came to lead us back to the patient as soon as we told her who we were there to see. Lynch was protected by a blue, almost purple-colored curtain, but had no more privacy than any of the other patients. The only reason all three of us were allowed to see him was because of Booth's badge and Lynch's status as a person of interest.

"Mr. Lynch was thrown from a speeding car," the scrubs-clad, dark-haired nurse informed, going immediately to check the vital signs presented by the equipment he was connected to. She turned her back to us but talked louder to compensate. "It's a minor miracle he's still alive. Maybe because he was already unconscious at the time."

"Unconscious?" Booth repeated in question, looking over the body lying still on the bed.

Warren Lynch was a big person, but even he looked little with how injured he was and covered in white sheets. His face was red and purple from injuries and bruises, had some stitches on a deep wound by his eye, and part of his head was wrapped in gauze. There was a neck brace keeping his head propped up. One hand was in a full plaster cast and the other had a few fingers held still in splints. I could see part of another wrap on his left shoulder that disappeared under the sheets. He had two different I.V.s in one arm and a supplemental solution in the other. His right foot was raised off of the bed and was in its own cast, ankle tightly wrapped. If it weren't for the name on the chart and the height they shared, I probably wouldn't have even recognized the man.

"Yes, and badly beaten. Internal bleeding, broken ribs, both legs broken. Some spinal damage, broken pelvis…" The nurse turned around from the heart and blood pressure monitor and looked down in pity at her patient.

Brennan looked over the suspect. By now, he looked more like a victim. This was not how I had expected to find him. "When can we talk to him?" She asked, turning to the nurse expectantly.

She chuckled dryly. "Any time you want, as long as you don't expect a response. This man has severe brain damage." She invited, but then pointed at the electrode cables attached to the pads taped to various spots on Lynch's head, including a few out of sight and one at both of his temples. They led to an E.E.G. monitor. I didn't know what it was supposed to look like, but apparently it wasn't good. "Off the record, he's not going to wake up. Best case scenario, he spends the rest of his life hooked up to feeding tubes."

I shook my head slowly. That wasn't going to work for us. We needed answers that he had – but at least we knew at least one other person would have them; the person who did this to him. A lot of people would probably love to kick the man's ass, but what were the odds that someone would succeed right after someone tries to disguise a corpse as him?

"This is one of the richest men in the country," Brennan objected.

She lifted her shoulders helplessly like she didn't know what to tell us. It wasn't sad, just kind of passive. She probably saw a lot of people injured, even if not to this extent, and there had to be a point where the damage was irreversible, no matter how much money they had. "Most of the time, that might mean something. Not now."

"Nurse Lawrence, this man holds the key to how and why Senator Paula Davis died," Brennan tried in an attempt to either change her mind or motivate a different, more optimistic, response.

"I'm sorry." She did look genuinely apologetic, but made no move to rescind her previous declarations. "Anything that man has in his head is going to stay there." Her pager lit up at her hip and she looked down at it, reading the small screen. "Excuse me," she said, not waiting for permission to go attend to her other jobs.

I looked over the man. It took seeing someone comatose for me to realize how lucky I was that my attack from Kenton hadn't been much worse. After he'd stabbed me and sprained my wrist, he could have kept going; he could have cracked my skull against the floor or stabbed me in the heart or lungs, could have beaten or kicked at me and punctured my lungs with my own ribs. I wasn't lucky I'd been hurt at all, but compared to Lynch, I got off easy. At least I made a full recovery.

"Oh, man," I said, more in amazement at the extent of his injuries than sympathy. "Who did you piss off this time?"

* * *

 **A/N: Love it? Hate it? Let me know! And wow, thank you guys for all of the great reviews. I really can't express enough how happy they make me.**

 **A/N #2: Oops. So I edited, uploaded, and formatted... and then forgot to actually publish. Sorry it's late!**


	4. The Titan on the Tracks, Part Four

_Why wasn't I told about this?_

"Because you aren't our keeper," I mumbled to myself. I'd have been worried about Brennan hearing me talking to myself, but the door to our bathroom was closed and she'd have a hard time hearing anyway over the hairdryer blowing by my face. Hair whipped up around me and the hot air was starting to burn my ears, so I grit my teeth and grabbed my hair with my hand, pulling it away from my head while I blasted it some more.

 _If it happens again, I will take action._

Saroyan's words just wouldn't stop playing in my head. If it wasn't one phrase, it was another. I looked at the box on the sink and narrowed my eyes, and I started pulling my hair around a bit more aggressively as a result. _I will, too,_ I swore to myself. The model on the front looked sexy – plump, soft lips painted dark red and pressed together in a pout, eyes half-lidded, looking seductively at the camera sideways. I wasn't looking to be sexy, but the rebellious streak the woman seemed to be enjoying appealed to me, especially the piercing high in her ear and the gentle curve of the ring through her lower lip.

But I should probably figure out if piercings were considered acceptable accessories in a lab before I went that far, and while dying my hair a bit was fun and relatively harmless, body modification seemed a bit far to reach for what was essentially me pushing boundaries and pissing off my boss.

 _Am I clear?_

"Crystal," I hissed, turning off the hairdryer and setting it up where it was mounted to the wall to the side of the sink. Brennan's bathroom was a comfortable size; her entire apartment was on the small side, but since neither of us are the kind of people who like to spread our things out and take up a lot of space, sharing a bathroom has yet to be a problem. My hair was tangled now, strands wrapped around my fingers and rapidly-dried locks curly and separate from the rest.

 _Unauthorized experiments in forensics will get you fired._

 _They shouldn't need to be authorized by you,_ I fumed internally, grabbing my brush and yanking it through my hair, taking too much satisfaction out of the pain and the burn in my scalp. My hair settled down around me again as it straightened, pulled taut and orderly. _We were all great before you came along and decided you had to be top dog._ Why couldn't she just be one of those bosses that didn't give a damn what went on as long as we got results? Like Andy, who had turned a blind eye when his waitress drank a little Chardonnay from the stock to deal with being spoken to like a whore by half-drunken men who mistook me for an adult. I didn't punch them in the faces like I'd wanted; some of the lewd things they'd said to me had made my ears burn in humiliation and my face flush with anger, but they kept buying, kept _paying,_ so I kept serving.

I hadn't made a habit out of taking drinks from the bar, and it had happened rarely. Usually I pushed some of my own money into the register to balance it out, but I knew for a fact that Andy had known exactly why there was a wine glass behind the counter. Whether he'd heard the things being insinuated or he just trusted me to be responsible will probably always be a mystery.

My patriotic, law-abiding, overprotective father would probably have a fit if he ever heard that story.

 _But, if you insist on an organizational pyramid, I will be at the top._

"The bottom is the most important," I said to the mirror, the defiant reflection looking tired and frustrated but stubborn and determined. Vivid fuchsia streaks were dyed through my hair, starting at the tops and reaching down in ribbons to the ends. "Because if the base isn't stable, the pyramid falls down."

* * *

Angela was in front of her main computer at her desk and Zach had dragged forward a metal chair to sit next to her. His legs were awkwardly crammed between the legs of Angela's chair and one of the computer systems under her desk.

"After Zach nagged me a _hundred_ times," Angela prefaced, rolling her eyes with only mild annoyance.

Zach straightened up, looking slighted, and he frowned at her, looking away from the orange figure generated on the large computer screen. "It's important for us to show how the victim's shoulder and elbow were dislocated!" He insisted, glaring at the artist for making it seem like he was nagging for no reason. I noticed he didn't claim not to have been nagging her.

Angela sighed quickly. Booth and I, standing behind the two, shared a look and both of us shook our heads. Having a relative to work with still seemed like a foreign idea, but in times like these, it seemed the most buyable.

"I recreated the most likely sequence," she finished what she'd been saying and she pressed down on the space bar on the keyboard.

The monitor zoomed into the torso of the orange form. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and watched with my head canted. The left arm was held out, and then the humerus was moved backwards. It extended as far backwards as it could in the socket joint. The bones cracked. Again, the sound echoed like the cracking of knuckles as the bone was pulled out of the joint.

Booth winced and leaned backwards. "Ouch!"

"The victim was dead when this happened," Zach pointed out as he twisted to look over his shoulder. "He didn't feel it."

"Yeah, that _doesn't_ make it seem any better," I informed him, shrugging my shoulders. After being stabbed in the gut, having a dislocated shoulder didn't seem quite as bad. The noise was distressing, but at this point, I'd seen and heard worse.

Booth was frowning unhappily, but he commanded, "Run it again."

Angela threw him a disgruntled look for making her watch it again, but hit the spacebar. The short presentation ran again. Zach didn't react to the sounds from the speakers this time around, either. Booth uncrossed his arms and held out a hand, pointing at the computer.

"It's like he was putting his jacket on," the agent mused thoughtfully.

Angela nodded like it had occurred to her, and then needlessly stated, "Corpses don't usually do that."

"These injuries occurred when the corpse was _forced_ into a jacket," Zach concluded, nodding to the side at the computer screen to point it out.

"Probably by two people," I added, trying to see it playing out in my head. On a visit to Booth's, he had taken Parker and I to the playground. I thought it had been him trying to get us to bond. Convincing Parker to put on a sweater when he had just wanted to wear a jersey had been somewhat difficult, and I'd jokingly informed him that I'd force him into it. He giggled and challenged me, so I'd taken his jacket, shaken it out, and gone after him. Though he kept his arms limp, it had been harder than I'd thought it would be without his participation. "One to handle the jacket and the other to manipulate the limbs with enough strength to dislocate them."

"Yeah, in a big hurry," Booth agreed. It was probably entirely possible to force a body into a jacket without doing damage, but if they were rushing, they wouldn't have been too careful about preserving the health of the body.

"They had a train to meet," the artist realized grimly, looking over at Zach somberly. Zach looked back at her, getting it but not really feeling an emotional reaction.

Booth cleared his throat. At least those were some of the injuries explained. "Anything on the lane photograph?" He questioned.

She moved the mouse on the tracking pad and pulled up another window. In this one, it was a screenshot of a security camera attached to the top of a streetlight or electrical pole, looking down at several lines of cars moving towards the camera. Then the image dulled down to a grey, muted palette as two individual license plates were zoomed in on from the photograph. "It was relatively easy to get the license plate numbers from these two cars," she said. Both were Virginia license plates.

"I'll check 'em out," Booth promised.

"But chances are, they're just civilian vehicles," I finished. It had to be said.

"There was another car." Angela continued. She minimized the license plates and the image brightened. "Rich guys keep their cars shiny. The reflections created another image." She moved to the car at the front of the line nearest to the camera, which we'd already confirmed was Lynch's registered vehicle. The right side of the car was reflecting with light and very faint colors, and the outlines of a yellow box were drawn around the side of the vehicle.

"Just like we found the kid from the reflections when Charlie Sanders was murdered." I reminisced. Charles Sanders had been led out of a public mall by another child in his foster home, and we'd identified the kid from the reflective surfaces around the security footage. On the computer screen, the box was zoomed in, the colors not belonging to the car and its inhabitants refined and enhanced by her software.

"Adjusting for the defraction of light caused by the curve-" Zach started to explain as the image became clearer and more distinguishable as an actual person, but Angela beat him to the punch, interrupting him.

"It's a Navigator," she cut in. "But get this." She enlarged the image so that we could see it from as far away as we were. It wasn't a very good quality picture. "I don't know if that's any use to you."

I rolled my head on my shoulders and a chunk of my hair swung out in front of my face from behind my ear. The violet streaks stood out roughly against the black of the rest of my hair. "That bastard," I insulted. I felt a little bit better, even though he wasn't here to hear me calling him names.

"Yeah," Booth tersely said to Angela, reaching into his pocket and getting his cellular without even looking away from the screen. "That's of use."

Both of us turned to go leave, Booth aggressively opening up his phone while I was just about stalking. It seemed like we had a crooked private investigator to go shake down or something. I hated being lied to and especially by someone who just rubbed me the wrong way to begin with. There were several things about Turco that I didn't like, but if I had to make a list, on it would be the general smug air about him and the quiet arrogance he carried with him. Then there would be that he liked to snoop around in peoples' private lives. Private investigators. I can't stand the idea. I understand that they can be moral people utilizing available skills, and I understand that a lot of people who hire them probably have good reason, but there are always those who use them to get around restraining orders, collect blackmail, or something else nefarious.

As I thought it, I realized that part of the reason I didn't like private investigators was that someone like Oliver Laurier could hire one to look into me – follow me, take photos of me, and take them back to him in spite of the restraining order I had filed against him before everything in my life went upside down. I highly doubted Laurier would become violent – he was an obsessional stalker, but not only was he physically weak and unskilled, he was persistent. And creepy. I don't want some jackass guy in his thirties who can't take a hint to know where I'm living or what color my hair is or how I like my coffee or anything else about me.

"Booth! Do either of these count as experiments?"

Booth stopped and turned around, pausing before he hit the button to make his phone call. I looked over my shoulder more slowly, knowing exactly where Zach's anxious question was coming from. _Damn it, Saroyan,_ I internally seethed. _Congratulations. You've made them afraid to do their jobs._

"Because if they do," Angela spoke when Zach stopped, looking at Booth and giving him a sarcastic version of a smile, "We could both get fired by your old sweetheart."

"Tell you what, if you didn't find it fun, she'll probably be cool with it," I said roughly, unwilling to wait and hash out everything they did and how well it complied with Saroyan's code of conduct. Angela's sarcastic smile fell and she frowned at me as if concerned.

Booth started to laugh lowly. "You know, you just…" He waved his phone in Angela's direction. "Quit telling Bones who you think I've slept with."

I made a face. _Not this again._

" _Think?"_ Angela repeated, smirking coyly. "What do you mean, _think?"_

I knew my brain had a tendency of running away from me, so these were things I didn't want to hear about, ever, no matter how juvenile that may make me sound. "Is anyone noticing that I don't need to be hearing these things, yet they keep seeming to pass through my ears?" I objected loudly. Zach looked between Angela and Booth curiously. None of them seemed to have pity on me for my plight. I rolled my eyes. "I'm getting food," I announced, in case anyone cared. "I haven't eaten all day."

"When are you going to start taking better care of yourself?" Booth asked, sounding like he was wondering honestly if I ever actually would. He followed me out of the office while complaining.

"Probably the thirtieth of February," I informed him, injecting my voice with optimism.

He sighed in exasperation. The agent took a second before he realized the problem with the date I'd given. "It won't come soon enough – wait…"

I was snickering all the way down the stairs.

* * *

I went through the lab looking for Booth curiously after finding some food. Regardless of anything to do with Turco or Saroyan, Booth was supposed to drive Brennan and I to the jail. Brennan had an appointment at the prison to speak to McVicar's killer. Even thinking that phrase made me feel weird, like there was something itching under my skin; I wondered if it counted as cognitive dissonance, to be so fucking happy that McVicar was dead, but also really pissed off that someone had killed him. _Holding two contradicting beliefs._ Did it count? It would explain why I felt so uncomfortable thinking about it; there was a lot of rage, but because of the circumstances, I was confused about who to direct it towards.

Anyway, Brennan wanted me there, too. I couldn't decide if that was a good idea. Depending on how the guy acted, I was liable to get up and shake his hand or punch him in the face – whichever would feel better. Still, we had come to an agreement a while ago that I was supposed to help keep her on track if something was affecting her personally, especially if it had something to do with a case. I wasn't sure that could apply here, since my foster family were victims of the same monster, but even if that had been an argument, she also felt I had a right to talk to the killer, too, since she wasn't the only one affected.

Neither of us were the only ones affected, though… Brennan's mother, Christine, had been slaughtered by McVicar, if a bit indirectly. His attack on her hadn't killed her outright, but had given her a subdural hematoma that killed her later on. Her father, Max, was at large, and had a bit of a right, but not if he wasn't going to come forwards and accept justice. Although I had to admire him to an extent – he had been in a robbery crew, but where the others were all arms and chaos, Max had been more smooth and careful to keep others safe, with almost no civilian casualties – I still couldn't condone what he'd done. That's not to forget Russ, or even Aaron; Rosemary and Nicholas had been his parents, and did he even know they'd been found?

I wouldn't know where to find him, even if I did think I was emotionally prepared to do so.

Finding Booth turned out to only be half the battle, as I heard his voice talking to someone inside a lab room which Saroyan had converted into her own. I stopped outside the open door, invisible to the parties inside, and listened. Not only did I want to avoid the pathologist; I didn't want to be in a room she'd made her office. It had taken me a long enough time to grow comfortable in Hodgins's, Angela's, and Brennan's offices, and I had never really been on _bad_ terms with any of them.

Unfortunately, she was definitely inside. "Two people forced the corpse into the jacket." She sounded surprised, but also a bit awed. "That's excellent work." She was a coroner, not an investigator. No way she didn't understand how crucial forensic work could be, so even though I didn't particularly want her praise, it still made me a little smug to hear her taking note. "Who's that?"

"I think it's Rick Turco." Booth responded. Their voices weren't loud, but since they weren't making much noise in the room and I was the only person in this part of the hall, it was easy to overhear. And I did want to eavesdrop; sue me. I wanted to know how Saroyan treated Booth, treated others, when she wasn't busy pissing me off by treating me like I didn't know how to do my job.

"That means Turco's probably the last person who saw Lynch before he fell off the radar."

"Of course, Angela and Zach are scared that this counts as an experiment, and you're going to fire them."

This was another thing that reminded me why I liked Booth. He was protective of me, which used to bother me, but now I've just sort of accepted it. He doesn't control me, just looks out for my interests, and it took me a while to understand that. He looks out for everyone he considers his friends or family, even openly being concerned for Hodgins in a routine diving expedition on Assateague Island. This sentence wasn't accusatory, but there was both a question and a soft, slight reproach hidden in there that his old friend may be overdoing it a bit.

I didn't risk peering around the corner to see. Most people would feel bad about eavesdropping, but this was definitely a conversation I didn't think they'd be having if I was in the room. If it were Booth and Brennan, or Hodgins and Angela, I'd give them privacy and walk away, but as it was, I didn't trust Saroyan and wanted to know what she had to say.

It sounded like she was smiling. "Ah! I _am_ getting through."

"Why did you take this job, Camille?"

Ugh, they were using first names again. It was weird with them. First names indicated familiarity, but when they did it, it was also seriousness. When they were just being familiar, he called her Cam, and she called him Booth, like pretty much everyone else does. It wasn't too different from Hodgins calling me Xena to be friendly versus Holly, a couple times in the hospital when he was concerned after I'd been stabbed. I didn't like that they were apparently that close.

"Why shouldn't I, Seeley?"

"Because it's basically herding cats, and… you're a dog person."

 _Should I be offended he's comparing us to cats?_

"Dogs herd cats," Saroyan mildly pointed out, tone hard to define.

Booth laughed softly. "Dogs don't do that."

"Ah. Chase them up trees. Whatever." They were joking; I could hear that plainly, and if I were on good terms with her, I might have actually admitted that she had her own good humor.

 _Should I be offended that she thinks she's chasing us up metaphorical trees?_

"Seriously, Cam. Why did you take this job?"

Something metallic clinked. "These are titanium rib-clippers from Germany. My last job used bolt cutters from Home Depot." I winced to myself. Just the idea of using bolt cutters on remains seemed not only callous and crude, but horribly lacking in finesse, ease of control, and neatness. Okay, so that I could appreciate. "These are much, much nicer." Seconded. "This autopsy table has downdraft ventilation. No rotting corpse smell. My last table didn't even have a drain." I grimaced. _No, no sympathy, don't feel sympathy._ "Think about that a second, Seeley. Leaky corpse, no drain."

I chose not to think about that, but when you're actively choosing not to think about something, it becomes a lot harder not to think about it.

"So, you took this job for better equipment?"

There was nothing really wrong with that. I certainly didn't feel upset about it. No, Saroyan just being here wasn't what was bothering me; it was her familiarity with my people that had first gotten under my skin. Someone I potentially couldn't trust around people I was supposed to protect was not going to fly. If I'd been able to get to the point where I at least had a mutually-respectful relationship with her, then I'd have gotten over it. As it was, she'd just started to treat me like a child rather than someone who had earned their place. I have been hurt so many times trying to do this job, it's _insulting_ to be treated like I can't.

So, really, her reasons for coming here didn't matter, so long as they weren't malevolent. Just wanting a better place I couldn't fault her for. Wasn't it what I had done, anyway? Spent more and more time at the Jeffersonian, because I preferred it to my "home?" The bar I'd been working at?

"I've spent my whole professional life in basement rooms with no windows. Now I'm in the Jeffersonian Institution." It was very factual, but there was only a short pause before she exasperatedly asked, "What?"

"Gotta ask."

Whatever he had to ask, Saroyan knew what he was thinking immediately. "You so do not," she disagreed.

"Did you take this job because of…" _Because of him?_

"God, the ego!" She laughed.

"Say it." There was a quiet intensity there, honed by looking straight into danger from criminals and the terror of war.

She respected that he apparently needed to hear it said out loud from her. She made herself stop snickering. "Nothing to do with you."

That seemed to be the end of _that,_ thank God. Aside from not needing to know too much information, I wasn't sure how I felt about Booth having had something with Saroyan, no matter how long ago or how different the circumstances were. I leaned most of my weight to the wall, but shifted some to my other leg, twisting pink hair around my index finger curiously, watching it spring back and unwind when I let go.

"I need Bones and Holly this afternoon," Booth said, changing the topic after an uncomfortable couple of seconds.

"Okay."

"It's about their parents' case." Something must have showed on Saroyan's face, because she didn't verbally reply before Booth firmly added, "It's a legitimate case, Cam."

"I know. I read the file." She said it, but she didn't sound quite too happy. _Well, screw you too, it's not your family that was hurt!_ In an unconventional sense, the Kirklands had been my first family. Although they were no longer a part of my life, they had been the people easing me from unhealthy, abusive, and unreliable relationships into the much healthier ones I had now, and even if I had never come to the point where I loved them, I still appreciated that. I still felt grateful, and sad that they were dead, and regretful that I hadn't realized they were being threatened to begin with.

Footsteps started again, Booth's heavier, flat-shoed pace beginning to come toward the door. I blinked. I hadn't considered how I would get out of sight when I was done eavesdropping or if they left the office. _Hallways… not the best location for eavesdropping…_

Saroyan unknowingly saved me from having to come up with a lame excuse and putting on an act. "Why hasn't she confronted me?" She sounded a little irritated, but mostly bemused, and maybe curious. The footsteps stopped, then started again, but slower and in the opposite direction. Booth returned to Saroyan, and the pathologist continued. "That kid's doing everything she can to make it obvious." _That kid._ I scowled. _I'm a kid to her._ "She doesn't like me being here. She's dyed her hair bright pink to be rebellious."

For a long pause, Booth didn't answer. I wanted to know why, and I wanted to see their expressions, but I wanted even more strongly to know how this would play out. What was Saroyan really thinking of me? Where did Booth stand on the matter? What would he tell her regarding my behavior, my thoughts?

Then, measured, he asked, "What is it you want her to confront you _about?"_ It was a pretty simple question, but his voice was guarded, cautious, and not just like he didn't want to start a disagreement. He was trying to protect me – to keep Saroyan from knowing what I didn't want her to know as much as to calm her temper before we really started to get at each other's throats.

"About me, making rules that she isn't exempted from." Saroyan replied. I almost huffed before I quieted myself. "She seems pretty unused to not getting her way." My shoulders raised, my face darkened, and I had to bite my tongue. She had no right to say something like that about me. She hasn't even bothered to learn about me. I've been trying to avoid making judgments like those on her, but she wouldn't extend the same courtesy? "I think she finds me intimidating. Right?"

 _Oh, hell no!_ I covered my mouth before I could laugh. If I had, it wouldn't have been mirthful.

Booth, however, _did_ laugh, loudly, evidently thinking it was just hilarious to entertain the possibility that the slight scientist actually had me ducking my head down and being passive for fear.

"Hey, I intimidate people," she defended.

"Yeah, but Holly…" I got the feeling he was shaking his head. "… Doesn't intimidate." That wasn't completely true; Epps had definitely had me intimidated, I just hadn't been willing to show it. Still, he was right – I don't really do the whole "intimidation" thing. "She's not rebelling. She's proving to you that you don't scare her."

"Then… what's she doing?" I liked that she was stumped. I liked that I wasn't so predictable. That she didn't know me, and she had to realize it. "She doesn't seem like the kind to hold back."

"She's looking out for the people here who already like you." Warmth brightened in my chest that he knew me well enough to recognize my motivations, quickly followed by annoyance that apparently he could read me. "You see the way she smirks… stares… doesn't conform…" All of the subtle points that indicated a lack of passiveness must have proved a point, because Saroyan didn't respond. "You know, you're missing a lot of details about her. She's _too_ used to being told no." His voice turned sad. "Except when she cares, she just doesn't listen, and then gets hurt for it."

I wondered if Saroyan knew he was my father.

"… You're not going to hurt her again, Camille." The first name proved just how serious he was, and it was said in such a deadpan tone, too…

I wondered if he was saying that on principle of being my parent, or because he wanted me safe, even from someone he trusted.

"Before you try building a cage around her, try learning her temperament first," he advised.

"You realize you just referred to her like a wild animal, right?" Silence settled for a short period. Booth didn't respond. If he did, it wasn't out loud. I wasn't offended, because I both understood the metaphor and the meanings and because I saw how the connection could be made. I'm far from typical or domestic. The pathologist sighed softly. "This isn't a zoo, Seeley, this is a lab."

"Yeah, but she hasn't been tamed." I highly doubted I ever would, to be honest. My nature was wild, and I was okay with that, I had accepted it, and I had learned by now that _being_ a little wild was best for me, because it let me keep my personality and I could always keep that bit of control of myself and my environment that made me feel less trapped, less endangered. I was also being taught that I could be wild and I could have people that cared about me at the same time. The closest to 'tame' I was going to get would probably be just around children – around Parker.

"You're in the territory, Cam. You can cohabitate peacefully, or you can start trying to possess the resources."

Okay, so, maybe I was a little hard to get, but Booth seemed to get what was going on surprisingly well.

"How can I help her to make the right decision?" I almost wished I could think that she sounded frustrated at having to ask, but she didn't. She sounded a little upset, but for the most part, she just sounded curious and hopeful. Maybe she didn't want to be having a feud, either… but I was only responding to being aggressed. "About me?"

"Well, first, don't _ever_ tell her to her face you think she's got it easy. I made that mistake once." He chuckled. I smiled slightly, though the memory itself wasn't that kind.

 _"_ _It's not a hypothesis," Booth argued. "You have a dead girl and a United States senator. This is exactly why kids don't belong in the FBI or science labs. You don't know anything about the real world."_

 _My jaw dropped slightly and I scoffed, throwing my hands in the air. "You're right. I have no clue where my parents are, I've been in the foster system all my life, and I still don't have an actual family. I live in a bad part of town where I get in fights just to get to my residence without being raped or murdered. I work in a bar, and despite my outstanding credits from high school for managing to graduate way early, I still can't go to college because I have no financial security, which goes right back to having no family." Angela gaped slightly, taking a step back. Booth looked meek and chastened. And I didn't even mention the abuse I'd gone through at the hands on some of the foster families! "But who cares? I'm obviously a naïve little moron who's clueless about real life. Thanks for enlightening me."_

"And, uh, you probably shouldn't say it behind her back, either." I bobbed my head up and down in agreement. Gossip and rumors had a bad habit of getting back to the people they were about; honestly, I'd rather her tell me what she thinks to my face than to have her talking behind my back. "Don't try yanking her around on a leash or manipulating her. Just be honest. And upfront. Most importantly, take care of her people. She'll really like that.

"Just treat _her_ well, too, or then _she_ won't be the problem."

I bit my lip, looking down to the ground. There was no way to interpret that in a way that didn't sound like they'd be protecting me if Saroyan began to more pointedly lash out. It sounded like that was the end of the discussion – about that topic, at least – and neither of them needed to know that I'd heard, so I stepped quietly away from the door and went back the way I'd come.

* * *

"Got no reason to lie. Facing life, at least. Probably going to get executed."

Mitchell Downs, convicted serial killer in the same super-max prison that had been holding McVicar, sat with his knees apart and his hands between them, chains keeping his wrists bound together and a similar situation on his ankles to stop him from running or attacking with much effect. The man looked intimidating, but not so much in an oversized prison jumpsuit with chains and cuffs. His dark brown hair had been cut short and there was a scratch over his chin like someone had clawed at his face. He didn't even bother raising his voice over a prison alarm as a door opened somewhere else in the visitor's area, but rather stayed level and controlled.

Brennan looked uncertainly over his face like she was trying to determine what kind of criminal he was just by how he looked. "What did you do?" She wondered, curious what kind of man would take out McVicar.

Booth stayed to the side of the room next to the uniformed prison guard who was mandated to stay with Brennan and I in case Downs chose to become violent. Booth was trying to give us the privacy to address our parents' murderer's murderer, but he wasn't going to leave us with someone he didn't even know as a protector. "Mr. Downs killed his entire family," he coughed into his arm.

Downs did a mimicry of a smile that showed his teeth predatorily. "I killed your friend 'cause he cut in the cafeteria line to snag the last orange juice. Broke off a sharpened toothbrush in his jugular." He confided with a vicious smile.

Brennan hesitated, taking pause at the ruggedly dangerous aura he gave off. "Mr. Downs, the man you killed-"

"McVicar," he interrupted her to edify. What, was he proud of who he had slaughtered now?

"He's not my friend." She ignored his interruption and instead just looked ill at the thought of befriending the man responsible for her mother's death. "He killed my mother."

"He slaughtered my parents," I bluntly told him, nodding my head towards Brennan since we were in the same sort of issue. McVicar may have deserved to die, but I had wanted it to happen legally after I had testified against him. I had wanted him to go down in an ethically condonable way where I could say that I had contributed to his fall.

Downs' expression grew into another smile. He shuffled his feet to turn his ankle towards the door and leaned forwards, hands together with fingers locked. "You come to tell me thanks?" He was just altogether too pleased for someone who had pretty much guaranteed his placement on death row.

"I'd rather punch you in the face and laugh as you bleed." The guard next to Booth looked a little anxious at that.

Brennan right away looked like she had swallowed a lemon at the suggestion of being grateful. "No," she replied tartly. "McVicar was my last chance to find out… some things." She paused before she gave too much personal information. "McVicar might have known something about my father. I can't ask my father, because he left a message on my answering machine, telling me to stop looking for him."

Downs sighed, taking offense that we weren't pleased. He shuffled his feet closer together and leaned backwards, straightening his back. "I'll tell you what," he proposed with an unnerving smirk. "Maybe look at McVicar's murder as a second message from Max – one that he didn't use the phone for."

Done talking to us, Downs stood up from his chair and turned his palms to face the floor, fingers still locked, and stretched his hands. His knuckles popped. Chains rattled between the cuffs on his wrists as they dangled from his hands, and the ones attached to his ankles made an unpleasant scraping noise against the floor as he walked slowly towards the door to wait for the guard to escort him out.

Brennan frowned for a few seconds, but about the same time it occurred to me, she jerked her head up and jumped out of her seat. "We never mentioned my father's name was Max," she called to his receding back. The guard pressed a button by the side of the door that lead back to the cell blocks, and the loud buzzing noise sounded through the room.

"Did you perform a hit for Max Keenan?" Booth demanded roughly, stepping away from the wall. Downs let the guard take him by the chains and pull him through the doorway without responding. Booth raised his voice in anger. "Did you perform a hit for Max Keenan?!"

The killer turned his head around to look over his shoulder, straight at Brennan. "Take it as a sign from God," he airily advised, clearly unwilling to answer outright. I stood up slowly, laced my fingers behind my neck, and looked up at the artificial lights in the ceiling.

* * *

"How am I going to tell Russ that our father ordered the death of another human being?" Brennan asked in the car, her elbow on the edge of the window and her hand by her mouth, her nails pressing into the soft skin under his lower lip. She looked like she was grieving for the loss of faith in her only remaining parent, and I didn't know what to say. The fact was that Max had ordered a hit. Max had hired someone to kill his wife's murderer, but that still makes him a killer.

Booth looked at her with worry and she didn't even notice. "Okay, _if_ he did that – and I'm not saying it happened that way," he reasserted. Maybe Downs had just enough information to lie for some reason. Maybe McVicar had staged it himself, telling Downs Max's name for authenticity. "Then your father took down the man who murdered his wife."

Which still wasn't good, but it was better than just killing someone for no reason, wasn't it? At least it made some sort of sense.

"Good people don't have other people murdered," Brennan answered, objecting to Booth's reasoning that killing Christine's murderer made any difference in the root of the problem. She looked back out the window again. What was with all the rainy weather this week? "Good people don't even know how," she murmured.

I had a pretty good idea of how to commit murder – I had several ideas off the top of my head, and I was also pretty sure I could figure out how to hire a hitman online if I really, really wanted to, but I'd need a Tor server, a well-disguised bank account, and thousands of dollars. Anyone who watched certain T.V. shows or movies, or was in a related field of law enforcement, would have that information, though, so I supposed that she didn't mean the process and was more puzzled over how someone with a moral compass could actually go through with it.

Booth was struggling to be comforting. Where Brennan was quick to look down on her father, having already harbored a long-standing grudge for abandoning her, Booth seemed to want to keep the scales somewhat level, at least until he had physical proof that Max was a person worthy of her detest. "Well, your father buried your mother in a pair of new shoes in a cemetery, with her dolphin belt buckle that reminded her of you because you both loved dolphins."

Brennan snorted at his attempt, but at least she didn't go after him for trying. "That does not make him a good man."

"People can be more than one thing," he almost disagreed. It suddenly hit me that he might be drawing parallels to himself, too. McVicar was a bad person who had others murdered, and Max had seen to it that he was dead. Booth had done the same job, just in a government-sanctioned scenario. "We were at a dead end! Now we know that your father got to Mitchell Downs and persuaded him to kill McVicar. We find out how he did that, and we're that much closer to finding out what happened to your old man. I mean, that's… if you still want to find him."

Worried if she'd changed her mind, he looked between her and the passenger side mirror and then abruptly looked in the rearview when she noticed him watching her.

"I do," she said firmly.

"Okay." He reached over between their seats and patted her arm in comfort. "Silver lining."

* * *

I poked my head into the hospital room where Amy was. She had her eyes closed and a white cord was running from her phone to her ear, so she didn't hear me the first time I said her name. I stood there for a minute. Neither of her parents were there at that exact moment, so I decided to just enter. It's not like knocking would do any good.

Eager to talk to my friend, I went up to her bed and bumped the metal end of the frame with my hip. The bed shook a little and Amy jumped, her eyes flying open. As soon as she recognized who was there, she calmed down, and she took the earbuds out of her ears, smiling sheepishly in welcome.

"Sorry," she apologized. "I was listening to music."

 _I noticed,_ I thought wryly. "What kind of music?"

She looked at her phone, then the earbuds, and then separated them to offer one of them to me. "It's Matchbox 20. Do you want to hear?" She looked a little hopeful. I was the last person to not understand an attachment to certain songs, so I took the earphone to listen. Peoples' favored music was usually an insight into their feelings, and even if it wasn't anything profound, I'd still like to know what kind of melody she liked.

I listened to the strains and perked up immediately. It was one of a handful of songs from the band that I actually knew. " _Three A.M.,_ " I said brightly.

Amy nodded and released her lower lip that she'd been chewing on, opening her mouth to sing softly with the melody that had slowed down for the bridge. The song was almost over. " _She believes that life is made up of all that you're used to, and the clock on the wall has been stuck at three for days and days."_ Amy had a pretty voice; higher than the singer's, obviously, so it didn't sound the same, but she didn't have to raise her octave to hit the notes. _"She thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway."_

I smiled supportively when she looked nervously at my eyes and I joined in on the next line to bolster her. I had no problem with hearing her singing voice; I enjoyed it, but if she thought it was embarrassing, then I'd just embarrass myself, too.

 _"_ _But outside,"_ we both sang as the beat picked up and the chorus's sound took over. _"It's stopped raining! She says, "baby!"_ "

 _""_ _It's three A.M., I must be lonely." Well heaven, she says, "baby…""_ I sang on my own while Amy took a breath.

Braver, she smiled at me. _""Well, I can't help but be scared of it all, sometimes." Says the rain's gonna wash away, I believe, this."_

 _"_ _Well it's three A.M., I must be lonely,"_ we both chorused together as the chorus restarted.

 _"_ _Well heaven, she says, "Baby!"_

 _"_ _Well I can't help but be scared of it all, sometimes."_ I finished, the music coming from my earbud quieting as the instruments finished out the song after the vocalist said the last lyric in time with me. Looking away from her after the music changed to something I didn't know – slow and country-like – I took the earbud out of my ear and handed it back to her. She took hers out, too, and lit up her phone screen to press the pause button.

"You're a good singer," Amy complimented honestly. "How come I've never heard you before?"

 _Likely the same reasons I haven't heard you before._

"I don't really sing for people," I said, grimacing at even the thought. Despite Booth's praise of my singing in New Mexico, I was still embarrassed at having been caught singing to myself in the cabin. "With the exception of trying to be as annoying as possible during a very long car ride."

Amy nodded in understanding and she looked at her phone again. She pushed the button to restart the former song. The cover of the Matchbox 20 album replaced that of another. Her thumb hovered over the play/pause button.

"Did you know this song is about cancer?" She asked quietly. I didn't respond, but I _had_ known. I wanted to know where she went with it. Most people listened to the song because they liked the sound. Had she started listening to it because of what it was about? Were her music choices changing to suit the emotional trauma she was trying so hard to adjust to? "The lead singer was one of the lyricists," she started to tell me the story, taking my lack of answer as a negative. "And it's supposed to be about his mother living with her prognosis."

I scraped blunt teeth over the chapped, plush skin of my lower lip. "Is that why you're listening to it?" I asked, careful how I brought it up. The topic was delicate. We were on the edge of the fence between talking about it and avoiding it.

Amy had had her hair cut while I was in South Carolina so that it was shorter. It used to go to her shoulders. Now it was down to her ears. It still tried to match its former volume, but with much less of it, it was significantly more tamed. She never told me why she did it, just asked if it looked alright. I assured her it did. Either she was trying out a style she'd wanted before she didn't have the opportunity, or she was trying to prepare herself for the event that the chemo started to affect her hair. The chemo had already proved unsuccessful, but it was slowing down the inevitable and buying time, so she let her parents keep signing off on it.

"It helps, sometimes," she admitted, keeping her head down at her phone and not looking at me. Her voice wavered. I did the nice thing and pretended not to notice. Like me, Amy didn't like to talk about it when she was close to crying. "Knowing that other people have felt the same way… that I'm not the only person. I made a whole playlist." She chuckled and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and then with the inside of her wrist. "It's kind of silly, right? Listening to these songs just make me feel sad, but I feel less alone."

Amy was never alone for more than a few hours at a time; her parents made sure of that, and I spent more time with her than I did with Parker and Booth, outside of work. Sadly, three people did not a healthy socialization circle make. Amy's classmates and friends didn't come see her very often, sticking to phone calls and texting. I suppose most of them felt uncomfortable being in the hospital when it was the proof that their friend wasn't going to be going on another skiing trip with them, ever. I still thought it was selfish of them to leave her alone. If I had other friends in our age group, I'd have introduced them to her, but I didn't. Amy was my only friend under twenty, and while Zach was closer than anyone else, I doubted they'd get along very well. Amy was kind and Zach had good intentions, but I couldn't see them getting along, and they had no vested interest in getting to know each other, anyway.

"If you feel lonely, I'm sure there are people who you can talk with," I started to suggest, unsure how she'd take it. She didn't like special treatment for her cancer's sake and rejected it unless it was necessary. If she was just plain lonesome, I'd suggest joining a club and convincing her parents and then fighting with the doctors to let her get out some. It's not like they could do much of anything for her in here, anyway, not with this disease. If she was lonely because her diagnosis was getting her down, though, an arts and crafts club at Hobby Lobby wasn't going to help that. "Hospitals and communities usually have support groups for cancer patients, assault victims, recovering addicts, trauma survivors…"

I listed several different reasons so that she wouldn't feel like it was a special thing just for poor victims who drew the short straw and got disobedient cell malfunctions.

She clenched her fists and looked up at me. "I don't want to go talk to a dozen strangers who want to hold my hand!" I put mine up instantly in surrender. I wasn't going to push her to do something she didn't want to. That sort of urging was up to her parents, not me, and I had no interest in it myself, so how could I expect her to? Amy lost the fire in her retort almost as soon as I made the gesture. "I'm sorry," she sighed, her eyes falling.

I counted down from five in my head, knowing to give her a few seconds and she'd explain. I was the type of person to apologize and not want to explain, not want to have to offer the insight to my feelings about why I had snapped. Amy felt more inclined to justify herself so that she was absolutely sure they knew that she wasn't mad at _them,_ per se.

Sure enough – "My mom made me go to a meeting already," she lowly said, holding her left arm and turning her body to face the wall. She made herself feel alone in her surroundings because that was how she felt safer talking. I let her keep the illusion; shut my mouth and just listened. "There was a girl who had to carry an oxygen tank, and wear the tubes under her nose all the time."

 _A cannula,_ I supplied mentally, but had already decided to shut up until she wanted me to talk.

"A boy was in a wheelchair because he was too weak from the chemo… a lot of them were wearing hats." Self-consciously, she touched the back of her head, feeling her wiry brown hair. "Most of them were younger than me. I didn't feel less lonely. I felt more _sad._ For one of the first times, I really got angry at that director's assistant for giving me this disease."

It amazed me that Amy wasn't so furious she screamed and fussed about the injustice of what had happened to her. If I'd been her, I would've been railing against the universe, testified against her killer, and sued and suited the hell out of the culprit _and_ the hospital for failing to thoroughly look into their donor organizations. Trying to make money, a woman who hadn't even finished med school had decided to harvest illegal grafts and split the profits with a funeral director who supplied the bodies. She used the information of a reputable company that had since gone bankrupt as a front to sell the grafts. Those grafts, because they were illegally taken, hadn't gone through the necessary tests; if it wasn't in the deceased's history, then they didn't know of any illnesses. The man they'd taken Amy's graft, as well as many others' from, had had undiagnosed mesothelioma. They gave it to at least a dozen people, and had killed two by the time we found out about it through Amy's suspicious contraction.

Last I checked, seventeen other people had been confirmed to have mesothelioma; three other than Amy had advanced to a stage that meant almost certain terminal prognoses, and excluding those three, another eight had confirmed metastasized cells. Six people had emergency surgeries to get the tainted grafts out before they could do the same. The eight non-terminal victims would have to undergo lifelong treatment methods, including drugs and/or chemo to control it. They had also had the cancer-riddled grafts removed, and all were being regularly tested. If there was only one or two other infected bones, they were on wait lists to get those taken out and replaced in hopes of stopping the cancer in its tracks.

While not the most disturbing killer I'd come across, it was one of the most terrifying, and opened my eyes to the dangers of grafts and hospitals. My friend was dying because of it; a very, very slow death, psychologically torturous, downright cruel. No other killer, not even Epps, had had that many victims. It was _possible_ McVicar might have had that many, but I couldn't know that.

I saw her raise her hand and heard her sniff. "Can we talk about something else?"

I was really quick to nod. I promised both of us that I would listen whenever Amy wanted to talk about her disease or prognosis, but I hated it almost as much as she did, so I would never complain about changing the subject. "Of course. How's your art going?"

Amy gave herself a moment and I waited patiently. She rubbed at her face before she turned back around on the bed, crawling to face me instead of the opposite wall.

She sighed with frustration. "It's slow. I'm experimenting with surrealism." She looked at me in interest and I gave her a thumbs-up. Some of her art terms she had to explain to me, so now sometimes she waited to see if I would ask. "You know, since I'm not exactly going many places and seeing many things anymore." That sounded bitter. She turned away from that road. "My oil pastels are getting small, so I'm trying to do it with paints: acrylic for the realism, and runnier watercolor to illustrate the dreamlike parts of the surrealism."

"Surrealism… that's like Salvador Dali, right?" I'd had to learn about a few different kinds in a mandated art class, and everyone knew who Salvador Dali was – if not by name, then by his artwork, especially the one with the time concept.

"Yeah. He did the one with the bending and melting clocks," she giggled. "I had a picture of that on my desk at home." She paused and silence took over. "What are you doing?" Apparently there wasn't much new going on in her life. Mine got too complicated sometimes, but hers was too simple. I wondered which was worse.

"Oh, you know." I rolled my eyes. It wasn't nearly as dramatic or exciting as meeting Brennan's brother or tracking down a contract killer. "Investigating murder, talking to private investigators."

She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "Are they really as annoying as T.V. makes them seem?" She inquired, resting her cheek on her knees.

I whistled to convey my annoyance. "He's as rude as Sherlock, smarmy as Mycroft, and about as helpful as Lestrade."

She giggled at my references. "Wow, he really _is_ bad." Then she gestured up to the television mounted to the wall. "Was it true that they found Warren Lynch?"

After a second of thought, I figured that it wouldn't hurt anything. He was beaten up, but he wasn't dead. She'd find out from the T.V. anyway, and if I didn't tell her, she'd take to the internet. "Yeah. He's in this hospital, actually, in the I.C.U.. He's been stable, so they're probably going to move him to an extended trauma ward soon."

"I might regret asking, but how bad was he?"

"It's not looking like he'll ever wake up," I sighed, frustrated with the as-good-as-dead lead and passing it off as aggravation with human beings for being so mean to other human beings. "I think the doctors suspect the head trauma will eventually cause brain death. And it's not just that, either. He was practically pulverized. I'm almost glad he's unconscious, you know?" I confided. I wouldn't have said that to Booth, because he was too morally correct. In his mind, Lynch was unconscious because he was beaten. He shouldn't have been beaten, so he shouldn't be unconscious. "On his right hand alone, his thumb was dislocated and three fingers were broken. The doctors had to get a ring off of one of them." Amy looked a little sick just at the thought. She was probably remembering what it had felt like when she had broken her leg and trying to imagine it multiplied three or four times. "A heavy, thick ring from a basketball championship."

She cringed. "Yikes," she gasped. "That's pretty bad. At least I'm not in pain." She had no chance of recovery anymore, not with all the metastasis that the mesothelioma had gone through, but her stay wasn't one where she was going to be in horrific pain or drugged up to the sky on narcotics for the next few months. "Doesn't swelling go down over time?"

"Most of the time, but the E.E.G. studies don't look promising." I looked at my fingernails and absently picked at them, looking back up at my bushy-haired friend.

"Why didn't they take the championship ring away from him?" Slouching her back forward to reach her knees must've gotten uncomfortable. She put her knees down and then crisscrossed her legs instead.

"I dunno. Negligence?" They'd been negligent enough to put a car on train tracks, even if it had been a forensic countermeasure. "They were crunched for time," I offered as an excuse without telling her about the train crash that they'd been trying to cause.

"But the ring is a big deal," she persisted in asking. "He was kinda known for the championship, just like with business. If they were faking his identity, someone would've made sure all the important jewelry was on the fake, right?"

 _I should utilize Amy's fresh eyes more,_ I thought appraisingly, leaning back further in the chair by her bed and crossing my right leg over my left. "I suppose…"

Amy kept going, cocking her head and starting to smile slightly at herself for helping. "And anyone who would particularly want to dress a fake as Lynch would have to know enough _about_ Lynch to confidently pass it off," she made a very convincing argument.

I touched the ring finger on my right hand, where Lynch wore his championship ring after he had gotten married. He'd moved it from his left hand to his right. "But it was also the one thing that might have actually meant something to him." Which meant it was the one thing of significance; the one piece of jewelry he would have made a fuss about parting with. Apparently more so than his wedding ring, even, but his marriage was already in trouble.

"Not a coincidence, then," she guessed.

"Probably not," I agreed, narrowing my eyes at her intently. Was she a detective in a former life? "The only way anyone would have listened to his input would be if Lynch had been calling the shots on what was going on…" Which meant that Lynch had been part of the plan to crash the stock, and then he'd also been partially responsible for the train wreck. Something had gone bad with the plan, though, and that had gotten his partner, or partners, to kick his ass and throw him out on the road. "He was in on the plan from the beginning."

* * *

 **A/N: I've just started college and it's made me a lot busier than I anticipated, so updates might stop being so regular. I promise a finish to "The Titan on the Tracks" next week and hopefully more to come very soon.**

 **As stated, the song used is "3AM" by Matchbox 20.**

 **Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	5. The Titan on the Tracks, Part Five

I stopped to ask an agent I'd seen around a few times (a ginger woman with brown eyes and a short height) if she knew where Agent Booth was, and she directed me to his office. I thanked her and rushed off to find him, all but running through the hall to get to the right place. He was where she'd suggested, and I knocked on the door, opened it without waiting, and hurried in. He looked up from his computer, looking a little irritated until he saw that it was just me, and he leaned back to listen to whatever was so important that I'd run in.

"Warren Lynch was in on the crime," I declared, holding my head up high, proud of myself for figuring it out, even if I had had Amy's help.

He leaned back further, pushing the chair to recline. "That came out of nowhere," he remarked, bewildered by the lack of introduction. "Where'd you get that idea?"

I rubbed my palms together, glad he'd asked, and hooked my toes under the leg of the chairs across from him. I dragged it towards me. Since I only had one of the legs under my control, it came at an angle, but I sat down with it at that angle and crossed my legs.

"Amy pointed out that the championship ring actually meant something to him, and it was also a prize of his," I explained the significance first before the logic, and kind of glossed over the part where Amy was included. I didn't talk to her about the cases unless she asked, but having a father who was a little overprotective where his job was considered made her naturally curious about the processes of the investigations, so usually she ended up with the basic details. She knew not to talk about it to anyone who wasn't also involved. "Why would he keep it on when someone else was trying to positively convince everyone that the corpse was him? Well, it was his decision. He knew what was going on, and he was involved."

He nodded as he kept up and then smiled. "That's good, kid."

I agreed. "The only reason his notable jewelry wasn't taken off of his hands was-"

"-Was because Lynch was calling the shots," he concluded, understanding. He leaned in like it was a conspiracy. "And I know exactly who was in on it."

* * *

We had the grounds to arrest Turco, and we did so almost immediately, Booth going and dragging him out of the woodwork with a shining pair of handcuffs around his wrists. Saroyan had wanted to watch the interview with Brennan – I think it may have had something to do with her wanting to control Brennan and I.

That was confirmed when I had picked up an earpiece and started to fix it behind my hair and she had told me to stop, that I wasn't going to work on this interrogation, and I had stopped, glowered, and waved Booth off, telling him to go on inside. I left the earpiece in but hadn't fought to go inside. Exactly what was I supposed to say or do in response to this? It was bad enough she was controlling me in the lab, now she was controlling me in the FBI, where I should feel safe? Hell, this is Booth's place, and sort-of mine by now!

I squared my shoulders, holding myself with stiff and uninviting posture, keeping my head up and staring intently through the one-way mirror at Booth and Turco, the arrogant P.I. sitting comfortably across the table. Although there was over a foot of space left in between us, Saroyan and I were shoulder to shoulder, her careful and unrelaxed where I was tense – would be calm and relaxed, except that she was _there,_ stopping me from doing what I always do, and so I was collected but fuming underneath, temper edging closer to a fever.

 _"_ _So Warren Lynch and I conspired to disappear him for a few days so we could profit from shorting Lynchpin stock, huh?"_ Turco laughed pleasantly across the table. His chuckle was lower than the pitch of his voice on average, and a bit rough, like he used to smoke.

Deceptively amiable, Booth returned with a half-smirk and held his arms over the table, his elbows on the edges and his hands out, palms-up. _"Well, you know, that's my thinking."_ His voice in my ear was much better than Turco's, more relaxing in general because it was familiar and I was past the point where I actually feared anger or judgment from him every day. I had my own secrets still, but for the most part, he knew what was going on in my life and I was still a part of his.

Turco laughed again, his lips stretched in a mocking smile. _"And dress a junkie in Warren's clothes, planted him in front of a train, and – wait, did I murder the junkie?"_ He slipped his tenses for a second there, between the verbs 'dress' and 'plant,' but that was a grammatical error a lot of people could have made and that wouldn't hold up as any sort of behavioral proof.

There had admittedly been times when I had felt unsafe while interrogating someone. The gangbangers I'd met while investigating the case of an accidental death of a Spanish maid came to mind. Much more notable was Howard Epps, the sadistic psychopath who still made guest appearances in my dreams from time to time. I was less terrorized by what I'd seen and more by the way I'd felt – violated by the way he'd talked to me, looked at me, even tried to _touch_ me (although I had broken his wrist in reproach), and filthy from how he used me to relieve himself of his imminent lethal injection. Turco made my skin crawl in a way that felt similar to Epps, even if he was far less of a psychopath than the latter.

I wondered if maybe Turco had some sociopathic tendencies going on there that I was cluing in to.

Keeping in mind that I was separated from any danger by the wall and a strong, armed, and protective FBI agent, though, made me feel a lot better about the ordeal. I was also healed enough that, even though I shouldn't be trying to take someone out with my left arm alone, I can fight back if I'm attacked, and I am one hell of a fighter. Saroyan probably didn't realize the extent of the damage done to me by Kenton, if she even knew anything had happened at all, and I'd like to keep it that way. She wasn't keeping me out of the room because she feared for me, by any means.

I wanted a straightforward answer, so I waited for the opportunity to ask when Saroyan would want the discussion to be as short as possible, so she could still hear the men talking in the interrogation room.

"Why didn't you want me in the interrogation?" I asked, tone soft and light but the words firm and very deliberately chosen.

Saroyan didn't flinch, and she didn't seem to have to think very hard on her answer. She'd probably been expecting me to ask. I hated the thought of being predictable to her. "Because you are a child, Booth is a professional interrogator, and Turco is a professional liar."

 _"_ _No, Bones said you probably found him dead."_

"He's a professional investigator," Brennan corrected Saroyan.

"A _personal_ investigator, though, ergo, professional liar," I had to grudgingly conclude on that one that the pathologist had a point; not that I didn't belong in there because of the context, but that Turco couldn't be trusted to tell the truth, and that he would lie his pants off with ease.

 _"_ _But what I think is that you and Lynch intended a white-collar crime. But then, a senator died…"_ Booth trailed off, allowing Turco a chance to finish the story on his own. Both knew that juries and lawyers tend to be a little more lenient when there was cooperation.

 _"_ _And then I got all hinky and tossed Warren out of the car at eighty miles an hour?"_ Turco finished with a guess, his tone raising at the end to mark a question and not a statement. My fingers itched to grab a pencil and paper to take inside for him to write that out.

 _"_ _Is that a confession?"_

 _"_ _Nah, nah. Just getting it straight."_

My curiosity wasn't satisfied. Why couldn't I apparently be trusted in an interrogation? Had she read none of my history? What she did conflicted with what she said; she was no nonsense, so why would she keep me if she didn't know for sure that I could do my job? She could have reassigned me but she didn't. Why? Booth may have influenced her approach, but I don't think he could have swayed her intentions.

"Exactly what did you think would happen?" I asked her, again serenely calm with no accusation. I sounded like almost a different person, attention divided between the interrogation and my own problems. "He'd intimidate me? I'd forget information?"

"To be in the FBI, there is an age requirement of twenty-one, from which you are four years shy. There's a reason for that requirement, and this investigation will not be jeopardized." She didn't look away from the mirror, either.

 _She thinks I'd blow it._ She hadn't said it – had more tact than that – but it's what she meant. I consciously kept my breathing the same but felt like I was simmering. I wanted to prove her wrong almost more than I wanted to punch the private investigator in the face.

Speaking of private investigators… _"You know, as a professional investigator myself, I have to point out that blackmailers make much better suspects."_

 _"_ _Lynchpin has no record of a quarter-million payout three days ago."_ Booth responded, having checked thoroughly.

 _"_ _Well, there's not exactly a column for blackmail payouts in the corporate books,"_ Turco objected mildly. _"If I had only agreed to the full payout, Lynch might never have been taken by those animals."_

 _Was he ever really blackmailed?_ I had to wonder. _Or was the whole thing just a convenient scapegoat story in case he was caught?_ Turco was smart, that was for sure, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had made the story as a back-up, just in case he couldn't stay out of suspicion.

Booth sighed, looking over to the mirror with a subtle look of exasperation. Saroyan's lips quirked when she noticed and she tried not to smile. _"Hey, let's play a little show-and-tell, huh? Because we can put you with Lynch moments before he fell off the radar."_ From a file in his lap, Booth picked up the top image, printed from Angela's computers, and slid the glossy photo across the table.

Turco picked it up and looked at the vague face in the reflection. While recognizable, it wasn't particularly distinct. The only reason it was feasible evidence was the context. Turco didn't blink, just looked at it with a low yawn. _"That's… maybe me,"_ he noted, playing the 'maybe' and therefore pointing out there was a possibility it wasn't. _"_ Before _he fell off the radar… we worked together."_ Turco's smirk returned and he pushed the print-out back over the table. _"Ha… you've got nothing."_

The bastard had done his homework on this one. I felt a sort of reluctant respect forming. Thankfully that respect did nothing to tamper the desire to throttle him.

Raking a hand through my hair, I turned my head to Saroyan and glared. "He's not going to get him to break at this point. His lawyer will have him walking," I predicted accurately.

Saroyan looked back at me calmly and she frowned as she took in my expression and growing determination. I readjusted the earpiece behind my hair. "Booth is excellent at his job," she maintained. Her faith in him would be touching, and I would have appreciated it in other circumstances. "He'll get him."

"Not without another approach, he won't," I retorted swiftly, mind made up. "I can't watch this."

I moved around Saroyan, giving the almost stranger a wide berth of space that seemed intentional and graceful, but probably came across as a little odd. She turned, shuffling her feet with clicking black heels and increasing agitation. "You are not to go in there, Miss Kirkland!" She called in protest while I pressed my palms to the door to the interrogation room and shoved open. Saroyan shut up before Turco heard the mutiny in the ranks and we appeared divided.

"Oh, two against one?" Turco complained, offering a half-smile full of teasing and charisma. "That's unfair!"

I seethed – at Saroyan for unsettling my place in my world, at Turco for being such a dick (as Booth had eloquently put it), at Lynch for taking a coward's way out and trying to pass this crime off when he knew people would get hurt. He would have left what small family he had to believe he was dead. They'd probably never forgive him for the trick, if he were to ever regain consciousness. I was pissed at Goodman for parachuting in a new supervisor without sticking around to soothe Brennan or give her a good explanation. I was angry at Aaron all over again. I was furious with Downs for listening to Max and killing McVicar, and my vengeance against McVicar was slamming into me again fiercely, reminding me that he tore apart Brennan's childhood and ripped away the one foster home I'd wanted to stay with. I was almost beginning to loathe Max for contacting Downs when he wouldn't talk to his own children, for ordering a hit, for making Brennan question herself and her family and then cry because of what he did.

The only person I could take it out on was sitting right there, so I did what any emotionally unstable person would do and I began to take it out on them – this release was actually legal, though, so what the hell, why pull any punches?

"Warren Lynch woke up in the hospital," I said with faux casualty. I saw the moment Booth realized that my mood had shifted to somewhere between self-destructive and violent, because he leaned away slightly in an impulse to give me the space I usually needed when I got in this head space. My voice sounded just a bit off in tone to anyone who knew what I normally sounded like, and while I was obviously anything but, I appeared almost dispassionate.

Turco laughed, just disregarding any seriousness that I'd brought into the interrogation room. Laughing at me like I was a joke. _Supporting Saroyan's decision that I can't handle an interrogation._ Tension began to build again and my vision centered on the clever but criminal little man.

"Ah, and he's talking, right? Is he pointing the finger straight at me?" Clearly the P.I. had expected for this line of attack to be used sooner or later before we gave up pressing him. I knew I would have if I were in his position, so I was prepared.

"Bingo," I answered coolly.

Turco nodded to me in invitation. "What's he saying?"

"That you let him take all his jewelry except his championship ring," Booth murmured, staring straight at him across the table and not even acting surprised that I was inside regardless of Saroyan's command.

Turco narrowed his eyes more confrontationally. "No," he said slowly, and lifted his eyes to me again, urging and egging onwards. "I asked, what did he say? In his words?"

Booth looked up at me in question for help, not knowing what to say. This was a thin line; the problem with saying something only Lynch could know was that only Lynch knew it. Chances were one in a million we'd actually say the right thing to shock Turco into shutting up. On the other hand, facts could be a lot more telling than dialogue, and Turco had already underestimated our abilities.

Turco was bored with me and back to toying with Booth, mockingly shrugging his shoulders and beginning to push his chair out from the table. "Unless I'm under arrest, I'm leaving, folks."

 _You're not going anywhere,_ I thought internally with a snarl.

"By the time you found the junkie, he'd been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in." I stated evenly as Turco paused, surprised, halfway through shifting his weight to rise. The man reversed the action and sank back down into the seat, his eyes rising up again in challenge. I obliged, eyes lit with fire. "You didn't anticipate that, so when you were getting his signature jacket onto the corpse, you had to dislocate his elbow, and yank his arm from the socket." The cocky expression faded, replaced by a neutral one covering up internal frustration or anxiety. "But you've got a train to meet, because the next one would take too long to wait for, and all that work would be blown, just raising suspicion… unless the train slammed into a corpse in Lynch's car and lit on fire.

"You knew people would likely die. You knew it was a commuter train. You just didn't intend for one of the victims to be a senator." Turco began to recover, but I'd saved the best for last, and I leaned slowly down over the table, reaching down and pressing my right hand to the table to balance and loom down threateningly. "The shoulder and the elbow popping, being set out of place… it sounded like knuckles cracking, except it was louder."

The bravado failed him. Visibly he was set off, looked a little nauseated; with no more arrogance or pride to confidently deter suspicion, he began to seem less intimidating and more like he knew he was caught. Turco looked away from me, averting his eyes towards the wall.

I leaned down closer, looking straight to Turco despite his new attempts to ignore me. Although I stayed hyperaware that Booth could reach the back of my neck, I didn't feel unsafe because of it. "And because you knew exactly what it was coming from, it was sickening." I pressed my other hand down at the edge of the table, fingers bent at the knuckles, and pressed harder, popping my knuckles loudly in the otherwise quiet room. Turco swallowed and shut his eyes, leaning away. "I've got you, bitch."

That was one of the people I'm hating knocked down off of his horse, and hopefully the fall had injured him too badly for him to get back on. I looked straight to the one-way mirror where I knew Saroyan and Brennan were watching and I smirked, smug and triumphant, knowing that Saroyan would be royally pissed but also proven wrong.

I looked to Booth as I stood up straight, pushing away from the table, and headed back to the door calmly like I hadn't just gone all _Xena: Warrior Princess_ on his suspect. Hodgins would be proud, considering he'd been calling me Xena for the majority of the time we'd known each other. "He's all yours," I said with a wave of my hand over my shoulder, catching the door out with my other hand and leaving into the smaller and less brightly-lit observation room.

I was immediately ambushed by Saroyan, who was waiting, nearly with steam coming out of her ears. Brennan was far less alarmed, just gave me a nod of approval before she left the interrogation to avoid the drama and conflict that had potential to blow up in about thirty seconds.

"I told you not to intervene and you did," she growled at me, keeping her voice down so that no one outside of this room would hear, but quite clearly enraged. She pointed emphatically to the mirror. "He didn't confess to anything!"

I just shrugged my shoulders. We've had convictions for killers who hadn't confessed before. "Maybe not verbally, but get a profiler to watch the recording. They'll confirm it. He's guilty, he knows he's caught, and he's in deep." Although we were the same height (aside from Saroyan's heels, which I took away and guessed I was probably actually a fraction taller), I still managed to make myself smaller and slip by between the pathologist and the wall to get away.

She turned around, and I did the same when I heard her shoes, backing up across the room to the door. I'd been here so many times, I knew how much space I had, walking backwards with my arms half-extended. I paused a couple of feet from the door. "Look – you don't like me, you don't approve of me – I don't know what your deal is, but I wouldn't still be working here if I wasn't good for _something."_ I pointed to her, letting her see clearly that I was annoyed, and making my argument with emphasis. "I may not be what you like for an employee, but I _do_ know how to do my job, and I do it _well."_

 _Okay, case made. Now get out before there can be repercussions._ Obviously I'd see her again, but only after she'd cooled down. I clicked my tongue and smirked goodbye while opening the door to get out and get lost.

"Where do you think you're going?" She asked, sounding less angry but still too confrontational for me to want to stay. She was probably just putting more effort into being professional.

"I have a friend in the hospital who needs to be visited." I hadn't been planning it, but as I said the excuse, I realized it wasn't a lie. I could go see Lynch as many times as I wanted while he was injured. He'd live a while yet, but I wouldn't ever get an interaction out of him. On the other hand, Amy's strength was beginning to fail, her appearance taking a turn for the worse, and while I could have several more conversations with her, I didn't have too much time left. These particular killers may not be responsible for her impending death, but they are not going to be the reason I miss out on my friends. Saroyan can flip my world on its axis, but this is one aspect she can't control.

I may not have control over my environment all the time, but I sure as hell am in control of my life. It's _my_ life, after all.

* * *

We had to all meet with Supek one more time the next day and we did so in the loft, around a table that had been moved to the center specifically for the purposes of this meeting. As the meld of Brennan's scientific work and Booth's field work, I sat in between them on one side of the table. Zach, Hodgins, and Angela were on the other side, and Supek and Saroyan were at the ends facing each other.

The woman pushed glasses further up her nose and held a file in front of her, leaning it on the edge of the table and slowly letting it sink down to lay flat. "Turco will admit to helping Lynch place a body in Mr. Lynch's car, and rigging it to burn with the intent of moving the market. Everything else – including placing it on the tracks – he said Mr. Lynch did himself."

I shook my head. That was a lie. There were too many variables that were left unaccounted for by that story. "Turco was in on everything," I corrected.

Supek looked at me between the two adults and replied smartly, "There's the small matter of proving that in court."

Saroyan had been leaning over the table while Supek spoke, her elbows on the table and her forehead rested on the tips of her fingers thoughtfully, but she put her arms down and lifted her head. "What's the maximum sentence on those charges?"

"Ten years."

"He killed three people!" Angela protested, looking at Supek, aghast at what Lynch thought he could get away with – and what Supek was considering giving.

"And put one in a coma," Hodgins added, glancing at Angela to remind her.

Zach was the most relaxed of all of us, leaning back in his chair with one leg crossed over the other, absently playing with the creases of the fabric of his jeans at his bent knee. "Yeah, but Lynch deserves to be in a coma, so it doesn't count." He said to Hodgins.

I sighed. "Do I need to explain the law to you, Zach?"

Booth exhaled and held out his hands in peaceful offering. "Alright, look. Turco puts all of the blame on Lynch, does ten years, and then gets all the money from shorting the stock. We have motive, means, opportunity… and, uh, a Dr. Sweets in the FBI has done a psychological breakdown on the recording from the interrogation. It's enough for a conviction."

Supek glared at Booth. "It's ten years or nothing," she reiterated, not appreciating the argument. "I can only work with what I'm given, and the forensic work on this was just not good enough."

She said it with such a matter-of-fact voice that I sat up straighter, highly offended at the way she sounded like she had _expected_ it to be subpar, forget that it _wasn't._ Brennan frowned. "What?" She demanded, stung at the accusation.

"You were fooled by fake dental records. You baked some spam." The way she said this indicated she did not believe that these were signs of legitimate forensic casework; in actuality, spam may not be as scientific-sounding as some chemical compound, but it shares enough properties with human flesh for a legit experiment. As for the dentals…

"We uncovered a fraud," I defended. Angela had made the identification the same way she always did; in this case, she'd just had inaccurate information. It was hardly the fault of anyone except for Lynch and Turco, whom had replaced the real records. "We found out who the victim actually was. Do you know anyone who would automatically think, 'huh, these dentals were probably forged, let's not trust them?'"

She looked over at me and kept her ground with a stern stare that did nothing to cool my heating temperature. "You shouldn't have been fooled by falsified records in the first place."

"I'm sorry, do you have a working knowledge of how we cross-check those digital records?" I challenged, reminding myself not to stand up from my chair and make this into a big deal. Instead, I kept going at the accuracy of her claim, and the rights she held – or lack thereof – to make it. "Are you an expert in digital records and computerized scanning?" Because Angela was. "Because if you're not, you're just projecting your frustrations unfairly onto us. Think with your _head,_ Miss Supek, not with your emotions."

"What did you want us to do?" Saroyan asked more calmly before Supek and I could continue at each other's throats.

"Your job," Supek responded sharply with a bite to her voice.

"Hey!" Booth objected, his hand lightly smacking the table.

Booth needn't have worried; Saroyan didn't let that slide for even two seconds before she was making a strong and inarguable rebuttal. "No, Miss Supek, you want us to do _your_ job." Supek's eyes widened and she shifted indignantly, opening her mouth to defend herself. "My people gave you all the evidence you need to fry Turco with any reasonable jury."

"Forensically-"

"We gave you everything you needed to arrest Turco," Saroyan evenly interrupted.

"Arrest is not a conviction," Supek countered.

"We gave you enough to reject his plea bargain and indict him on the wrongful death of a senator."

" _Indictment_ is not a conviction."

"You accept that plea bargain, the investigation stops." Booth warned her. Although it was passed off from us now that we'd done our jobs, there were still people in the FBI looking into Turco's past actions for any other potentially shady crimes he could be charged with.

"Indict him," Brennan urged. "Give us time to give you what we need."

"You accept this plea bargain, you don't deserve to be a federal prosecutor." Saroyan bluntly remarked. I looked to her, enjoying their argument; I didn't particularly like either of them, but I was rooting for Saroyan. All things considered, in this context, she was the preferred winner. And watching her smack down Supek was satisfying.

" _Dr. Saroyan-"_

"Yeah, it's scary," she agreed, cutting off the other before her argument could be made. "The whole country will be watching the trial, and you don't want to go in with less than a sure thing. But you put my people on the stand as expert witnesses, and that's a sure thing."

 _My people,_ I thought at first. Saroyan and I might end up with a joint custody arrangement at this rate. But then I realized – I was included as one of 'her people.' She had just included me in her supportive comment to the Jeffersonian team's abilities. I smirked. Maybe she'd stop standing quite so heavily on my toes with her soccer cleats.

Still…

Saroyan didn't know any better, so it was Angela, Hodgins, Brennan, Booth, and I that all cautioned, in synchrony, "Not Zach." Zach himself was nodding slowly, a little disappointed, but not even trying to argue.

"You tell people the story of what happened using the evidence these people provided, and if you have any ability as a prosecutor, you'll win the case."

Supek had very little steam left in her sails. Long nails clicked softly when she set one of her hands on the table, holding herself rigidly. "Are you finished?" She asked tersely, pride stinging.

Saroyan's reply was a polite yet horribly saccharine half-smile. " _No,_ Miss Supek. In the future, when you have problems with my team, you register them with me in private, not by grandstanding in a public forum."

 _Damn. I don't like her, I don't like her,_ I reminded myself, but it was hard not to admire her strong yet nonviolent approach to the prosecutor. That was probably the best thing I'd seen all week. While she and Supek both left the table, I let out a long breath I hadn't realized I was holding and nodded slowly, approving, at least, of this instance.

"Okay," Brennan muttered so that Saroyan couldn't hear. She leaned closer to me and looked around me to Booth. "I, um, sort of see why she got the job."

I kept halfheartedly nodding. She may not be the best fit for me as a coworker or supervisor, but if she kept defending my team the way she just did, then I think I just may be willing to back down just a touch. Not to the point of letting myself be stepped on and shoved out of my responsibilities, but maybe to cut her a little more slack. And for me, that's a pretty large succession.

* * *

 **A/N: Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	6. Mother and Child in the Bay, Part One

Booth called ahead to let us know that there was a crime scene that he was going to take us to, but the word also spread to Saroyan, and we heard it from her right after we got the message from him. The redundancy was a little annoying, and the speed was questionable. Had he called her before he called us?

Brennan was putting her things together in her office when the F.B.I. agent arrived. "Cops say the body washed up on the bay," he said like he was talking about the latest Yankees game. He leaned against the left of the doorway, semi-patiently waiting for Brennan to finish pushing her open paperwork into a drawer and collecting her belongings from her desk. "They think it could be Carlie Richardson."

"And I'm supposed to know who that is?" Brennan asked with a raised eyebrow, picking up her jacket and swinging it over her shoulders to push her arms through the sleeves.

"Yeah," Booth said bluntly. Brennan looked at him like he should have known better. He sighed while she pulled her hair out from underneath her jacket collar and straightened the hem, grabbing her phone from the side of her keyboard. "Disappeared a year ago; she was pregnant. C'mon, Bones, you have to get a T.V.. Or at least just, uh, thumb through a _People_ at the checkout stand."

Even I looked through the magazines on the racks to kill time while waiting for my turn to pay, but I wasn't surprised that Brennan didn't have the same mundane habits for keeping up with the latest reasons why fitness trainers hated doctors for their amazing body hacks or the gorgeous wedding pictures from whichever celebrity couple just came back from their honeymoon.

"Was it in the Journal of Forensic Anthropology?" She asked him rhetorically, knowing full well that an unsolved missing persons case wasn't going to be in that kind of literature. Picking up her bag and swinging it over her shoulder, she went right out the door past Booth, who teetered off-balance, only to catch himself with a few fast steps that also turned him around to chase after her fast-clicking shoes.

I hit the lights on my way out and pulled the door shut.

"Oh, you know, I forgot to renew my subscription," Booth called after her sarcastically. "You know what? You really need to take up some other interests."

"Well, I'm reading Ted Gioia's _History of Jazz._ Was she mentioned in there?" Agitated, Brennan went on and demonstrated her perfectly healthy interested, irritated that he had dismissed them. "Or maybe in McGhee's _Science and Lore of the Kitchen?"_ She brightened like a thought had occurred to her. "Or perhaps I should develop an interest in the mainstream media's exploitation of crimes for their entertainment value!"

"Shots fired," I laughed. I knew that she was serious in her annoyance, but she could be funny when she was annoyed, too – at least, when her ire wasn't directed at me.

Booth, too, started to chuckle after her, shaking his head in amazement. "You know, it's amazing, Bones – you can really be snotty sometimes!"

"So, Carlie Richardson?" Brennan prompted for a more thorough explanation of the case we might be walking into. She ignored his comment on her attitude and decided that he had suffered enough for his hasty remark about her lack of interests outside of her work.

"Carlie Richardson, newlywed. Everyone assumed she was murdered." Our agent sounded dull, like he'd said it over and over again, reciting by memory that had been ingrained. "Husband was cheating on her, there was evidence that they had a fight that day – he was covered in scratches. Witnesses said they saw him down by the marina. But, without the body, they had to kick him free."

Brennan didn't like to assume the victims' identities, but we could be sure that the bones would be waterlogged. The cops had found the body in the bay, and if it was decomposed enough to call in an anthropologist, then it might have been there a long time. "Well, if she's been in the water for a year, the bones will be saturated. I'll need nylon mesh bagging and-"

"Cam's bringing in everything on the truck," Booth advised, indicating the short turn to the right that would take us to the doors leading to the garage where he had parked. Brennan's supplies for a crime scene would be on the left, so she paused when he blocked the way and her eyes sharpened when he said the pathologist's name.

"Why is she going?" I asked, crossing my arms and feeling my good mood seep out of me. "If she's been dead since she went missing, there won't be much for a pathologist." I sounded competitive and rude and I knew it, but after being snubbed during the interrogation of the Lynch almost-murder suspect, I was kind of tired of Saroyan. It would be worse if she hadn't defended the entire team to the district attorney. "Hodgins, Zach, and the three of us should have the crime scene down."

Booth shook his head, this time a little bit sadly. I never really considered how it must feel for him to have an old friend and his current partners at odds with each other. We didn't actively try to put him in the middle, but if he said the wrong thing, then Brennan and I both complained. I felt a little bit guilty for that.

"You know, kid, sooner or later, you're going to have to accept that Cam is in charge now. She runs the place. It's her call."

"Because Goodman decided we weren't good enough on our own, even with our remarkable success rate," I stiffly finished for him. Goodman had at least told me that there would be a replacement for his role, but he had neglected to mention that she was a bossy prosecution-minded New Yorker who liked to give New York-related threats. "Yes, you don't need to remind me."

"Let's hurry," Brennan said, shouldering her bag with renewed vigor, determination giving her a powerful surge to her restarted stride. "I don't want the remains to be compromised. I don't _care_ if she's the boss; the bones belong to _me._ "

I pointed after Brennan in agreement. Boss or not, the integrity was more important than pleasing Saroyan. I started off after my roommate while Booth threw his arms up. He would have to give up trying to get the three of us to get along, right? His phone started to ring, going off with the generic Samsung tone muffled by his pockets, and he took it out and stopped, looking at the screen.

"Hey. Booth. … Oh, yeah. Rebecca."

Hearing the name of Booth's ex and Parker's mother, Brennan and I both stopped. Booth was hearing something he didn't want to listen to, and he rubbed his forehead hard with the heel of his hand, looking down at the floor.

"Whoa, wait a second," he objected with a frown. "Slow down, okay? This is my weekend with Parker. I am his _father,_ alright? Stu is your boyfriend."

Brennan and I looked at each other, each with wide-eyed looks of apprehension. This wasn't going to be something we wanted to get involved in. Arguments about custody didn't seem like a good sign. As far as I knew, Booth and Rebecca had gotten along as well as they always had for the last four years. This was a new problem to me.

Down the hallway and closer to the garage, Saroyan came out of an office, keeping a door open while a luggage-laden Zach came trudging out of the room, a backpack over his shoulders and his arms full of supplies. Saroyan waved over his head at us and let the door slide closed on the hinges. "We're going to be in the water, Doc!" She exclaimed, as if Booth wouldn't have already let us know. "Remember to bring the Traxon and soluble tape!"

Saroyan turned to Zach. He held out his arms as far as he could without the piles of rolled-up bagging and the case of – whatever was in the white plastic box – starting to fall. Saroyan took several bundles of mesh by the strings keeping it bound in cylindrical shapes, letting Zach take the case by its handle and shifting the last drawstring bag to hold under his arm. The two of them left the lab at the door at the end of the hallway into the dark, shadowed opening of the staff parking garage, which had artificial lights that were lacking in brightness.

"You know what's irritating?" I asked no one in particular, with a tone of voice that almost always led to rants. I went on without waiting for someone to dignify me with a reply. "She assumes we don't know enough to do our own jobs. She likes to drop reminders and hold our hands. This isn't school."

"Does she think I'm new at this?" Brennan shared in my displeasure for similar reasons and she looked at Booth, expectant for him to treat our, ah, concerns with the proper acknowledgement that they deserved. Except he was still on the phone, trying to listen to Rebecca. "I _developed_ the use of Traxon-"

"On the phone, Bones!" Booth hissed, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.

"I know," she said, nodding. "Get off. We have to go." Just like that, it was like she'd transferred about half of her bad mood right over to him.

"Rebecca, he's spending a lot of time with Parker, and I don't even know this guy!"

"She took Zach," Brennan muttered, disgruntled and glaring at the doors to the garage.

"Zach's _my_ geek," I agreed possessively. He's not an object, but he _is_ my fellow intern. We do a lot of stuff together in the lab and at crime scenes and now she's taking him with her as a mule. She's disrupting the routine we've set up and she's taking away someone who I spend a lot of my free time with. What's next? Will she start bringing take-out to Brennan's apartment for late-night dinners now? Calling me Xena?

Scowling at both of us for continuing to talk at slightly louder-than-normal volumes while he was on the phone, Booth pressed it closer to his ear and turned his back to us to actually try ignoring us. Real mature… although it's not like we were acting much better…

"Because you know what? I just want to make sure that he's a good influence. The fact that he, you know, rocks you – _rocks your world_ \- surprisingly, that really doesn't concern me."

Brennan rolled her eyes at the path his phone call was taking and stood up on her toes to tap his shoulder repeatedly. He tried waving her away again. "I'll just meet you there," she told him, and then left him to his phone on her own terms. It wasn't something I wanted to listen in on, either, so I turned to follow her, eyes downcast and shoulders tight.

"I – I've got to run, Rebecca. We'll talk about this later."

Only after he had taken the time to hang up and then replace his phone in his pocket did he realize that we had actually done as Brennan had implied and left him where he stood in the hallway, intending to go to Brennan's own car to get to the crime scene _before_ he and Rebecca settled a court date for their custody argument.

"Hey! Hey, wait up!"

* * *

"Why can't you go faster?" Brennan asked Booth, sulking with her arms crossed and glaring out at the street. "I don't see why I couldn't drive," she grouched when Booth slowed down at a red light. It would have been illegal for him to keep going, but I shared her annoyance. We were supposed to be the first of the Jeffersonian to get to the crime scene to preserve it and get accurate information.

"Because you're agitated," Booth answered her latter question shortly. That was a little hypocritical of him.

"What about me?" I questioned from the back seat. I really didn't mind riding in the back most of the time – shotgun was fun enough, but usually I was just as happy listening to Brennan and Booth talk and occasionally pitching in as I was sitting up by the controls. "Why couldn't I?"

"You're even more agitated," Booth retorted, looking up at me through the rearview mirror. I scowled at him. So we're _all_ agitated. None of us should be driving, by his logic. We should just catch a taxi. "You're just better at being passive-aggressive." When the light turned, he stepped on the pedal and the car moved forward with a bit more lurch than usual. The secondary inertia startled me into grabbing at the side of the door.

"I am not being passive-aggressive, thank you very much," I boldly pouted. Passivity doesn't suit me. If I'm going to be aggressive, I'm going to go all-out aggressive.

"What you've done is turned this into a competition between you and Cam." He peered at me in the rearview. I glowered at him a little harder. I still didn't really like that he was so friendly with her while I was ready to say goodbye and never work under her again. I would give her that she's a good pathologist, but she's not a very considerate boss. "Both of you have," he added sternly, looking at Brennan to make sure that she fully understood that I was not the only one to blame.

She defended herself halfheartedly, looking at the signs passing by on the road and frequently checking out the side mirror. "I just like to be first on the scene, that's all," she lied. It was partially true, but even we knew that Saroyan was getting to us. "To protect the evidence."

"She's not going to disturb anything," Booth loyally took Saroyan's side of the argument. My expression darkened and I looked away from the rearview mirror with my chin held high in defiance.

"No," Brennan snidely imitated me without realizing, looking out her passenger side window to avoid looking at Booth and keeping her head up, refusing to back down or act sheepish for her founded behavior. "It's all tissue and blood and D.N.A. with her. She doesn't appreciate the skeletal system." An interstate sign with an arrow to keep to the two right lanes popped up in the windshield. Brennan pointed at it. "You can take interstate seventy. It'll be quicker."

"Don't backseat drive, okay?" Booth snarked at her, reluctantly turning his blinkers on to do as she'd recommended.

Still a little bitter, I corrected. "Technically, she's passenger-seat driving."

Brennan chuckled, looking at Booth with her mood lightening significantly. "Oh, I think I know who's agitated," she said in a cheerily sing-song voice, finally recognizing the cues. She looked really proud for having noticed. It was cute.

The agent scoffed and tried to write her off. "Someone is annoying me, okay? That's different."

 _Hey, if you're going to pick at our problems, we're allowed to pick at yours._ He wanted to talk to us about how we were letting Saroyan intrude on our space and getting confrontational because of it? Then I guess he also wanted to talk about the phone call he made before we left. Maybe it was petty, but I felt better once I decided to do it.

I leaned forward closer to the front seats and teased, "More specifically, Rebecca."

Brennan gasped and her eyes lit up like a teenager who heard some interesting gossip. " _That's_ who's annoying you, because she has a new _man_ in her life," she prodded, grinning. We didn't need much more information to go on, since we had enough to be a pain in the neck anyway. He should have made his phone call somewhere more private.

"Uh-huh. That's funny." He threw a bitch face at Brennan and I was sure that if he was so inclined to twist around in his seat while driving, I would have been on the receiving end of an equally unamused stare myself. "Okay, so I am _concerned._ About my son. I wanna know what kind of guy this new boyfriend is." Hm. Okay, so maybe that was less taunt-worthy and more just responsible parenting. "And you know what? If she's not gonna tell me, I'll find out on my own."

Now that sounded less like responsible parenting and more like overbearing parenting. "You're going to run a background check on him?" I asked in distaste for the idea, clear in my voice. Sometimes he wanted our opinions. This was one of the times I was inclined to give mine to him, especially considering that, according to all signs from him, he wanted me to become a fixture in his son's life.

I understand wanting to know who your child is hanging out with. The problem is knowing where to draw the line. If it were the parents of one of Parker's friends, or a teacher that Parker had really connected with, then that would be one thing – but if it was someone that Rebecca knew personally, then going behind her back to invade his privacy was probably going to invite more trouble than it was worth. If it were me, I'd be pissed, not only at the invasion but at the insinuation that I didn't care enough to ensure a safe environment for my kid.

"Of all people, I thought you would be down with that." He looked at me edgily through the mirror. I caught the look in his eyes and realized that this was one of those times when he was going to be mulishly stubborn and only wanted to hear an opinion if it agreed with his own.

"I get your reasoning," I said slowly, not wanting to start a thing here. I had wanted to press his buttons, not become part of an argument that he needed to have with his ex and that I wanted to stay out of. "But that seems… indirect. Indirect and invasive enough to be noticed and seriously underappreciated." I tried to look meaningful rather than just like a bratty kid who wanted to get back at her guardian for telling her things she didn't want to hear. I could shift from juvenile to mature pretty quickly, and I hoped that he could hear that transition even without needing to watch me. "If Rebecca isn't appreciative of your concern now, it'll be worse if she thinks you ran a background check on someone she obviously trusts."

I cared about the state of Booth's relationship with Rebecca because I knew that if it crashed and burned, he'd be really upset. Mostly, though, I care because of how it affects Parker. A lot of children grow up with separated or divorced parents. Too many of those have a front-row seat to watching the relationships devolve into unhealthy partnerships that lead to bad habits, poor behavior, and, most importantly, bad models for children. If a kid sees an unhealthy relationship modeled for them, then they're going to think that's what a relationship is supposed to look like, and seek out an abusive partnership for themselves.

I liked to think that I had a pretty good idea of what a healthy relationship was supposed to look like. I understood the value of compromise and the necessity of setting personal boundaries – you can do this thing that irritates the hell out of me because I like you in spite of how annoying you are, but you can't do this, because it's intolerable for one reason or another. Or maybe it's a physical boundary, like refusing to assent to a form of platonic or sexual contact that makes one or both parties uncomfortable. Unfortunately for me, I had bad relationships modeled too often, and now I'm pretty sure that, if anything, my idea of a healthy relationship is a little _too_ picture-perfect, discrediting both real-life struggles and the realistic standards of getting along, because in my experience, a fight leads to assault. Rationally I realize that good couples will fight sometimes, but I'd prefer to date someone who I wouldn't fight with, ever.

Regardless of my personal desires for a relationship, when I looked at Booth and Rebecca, I saw a pretty good one modeled for Parker. He grew up in an environment that I approved of. Nothing was more obvious than that both of his parents loved him, even if they weren't together anymore, and either he didn't remember a time that they were or he was secure enough with his role in their lives to accept it. They both spent a lot of time with him – Rebecca more so, because of their custody agreement (which, actually, didn't go through a court and rather was worked out between the two of them), but she was always careful to make sure that, even when plans changed, Parker still got to see his father. I knew they had their share of disagreements, but when I was with them, they used me as a distraction for their son so that they could talk in private, and made sure to keep any raised voices in a completely separate location from Parker.

Perhaps most relevant to the conversation at hand was that Rebecca had trusted Booth's judgment to let Parker spend time with Booth while Brennan and/or I was present, as well. Wasn't it a bit unfair of Booth to take that trust for granted, but not show her the reciprocation of it when it came to someone she wanted in her life, and, by default, Parker's?

"This is the safety of my kid," Booth argued with me, but he didn't raise his voice. The few times that he had, I'd been unable to stop myself from cringing or flinching away, and he had seen, so he was always careful to keep disagreements as civil as possible. "If you were spending a lot of time with someone I didn't know-"

"That would be my choice," I interrupted, offended that he'd been about to state that he would invade my privacy like that, too. "Because I'm more responsible than most adults and I can defend myself. Also, I'm not a _four-year-old."_ Parker may not think twice about a stranger, but shouldn't Booth realize by now that if someone I don't know offers me candy, I'm going to assume it's laced with a date-rape drug? "I may be your daughter, but I'm not a kid, and you can't draw the comparison between myself and Parker in this context."

He set his jaw and the muscles in his throat tightened. "You don't understand my perspective because you've never been in this situation." I rolled my eyes. There we go. He didn't like what I said, so now he was shutting me down to justify not listening to what I thought. This was going to get to Rebecca and it was going to come back and kick him in the ass – I just knew it. "Have kids. Then we'll revisit this."

"Sure, I'll get pregnant," I scathingly replied. Just because I knew why I was being dismissed didn't mean I appreciated it by any means. If he didn't want to talk about it, then he shouldn't have elaborated on it after we were done getting back at him for his comments about Saroyan. "As soon as hell freezes over."

An exit passed on the interstate's far right lane and Brennan had gone strangely quiet while she listened to Booth and I have our disagreement. The car would have felt tense if she hadn't been there, but with her observations putting the exchange under double scrutiny, it was just awkward.

"I feel like this discussion quickly escalated into a family thing," she said slowly.

"It's not," I assured her, though my tone, clipped and brisk, suggested otherwise. "It's a discussion over the merits of privacy versus protection."

Right. Discussion. That was the word for it.

Brennan refrained from saying something else about the matter, though, and she indicated the upcoming exit sign advertising overnight lodging. "If you make a right, we can cut through Grafton," she suggested, going back to the same backseat driving that had caused this discomfort in the first place.

"Fine," Booth agreed tersely, doing as she wanted without another argument.

* * *

The crime scene was already thriving with life by the time we got there, but the police had been able to keep most of the activity well away from where the evidence was, which meant that while it would be a nuisance, there wasn't a big worry about exactly how valuable the evidence was after cross-contamination and tampering. Crime scene tape was up, but actual agents and officers were doing their part to keep back interested and concerned citizens as well as press crews.

Booth drove his SUV as close to the tape as he could and unlocked the doors so that I could get out before I saw the microphones and recording cameras. Like a mouse, I skittishly shifted to the other side of the car to get out the opposite side. No way was I getting any nearer to that than I had to. It would be stupid to say I hated the reputation that media coverage had given me, because it proved useful fairly often, but I _hated_ being approached and talked to as if I had even the slightest inclination to share my thoughts and feelings with these strangers I didn't even know, much less have equipment shoved in my face rudely.

"No, no, no." I started it like a mantra and kept saying it, jumping up onto my knees and keeping my neck bent so my head didn't hit the roof of the car. Undeterred by the news crews, Brennan just got out of the car like nothing was wrong, and Booth did the same on his side of the vehicle. Brennan's actions were more impressive, since the crews were to the right and the van shielded Booth from their view. In the trunk of the car was a windbreaker that had been left behind after one windy or rainy scene or another, and though it was a little big, I contorted in the small confines to get my arms through the sleeves and zip up the front. "I am not handling them today," I muttered. At least if I had a jacket that said "FBI" they would get the hint that I was working… I hoped… and that was only if they got close enough to see me, anyway.

Climbing out of the vehicle, I found that Brennan had walked around the front of the car to stand by Booth and look over what was going on, body-wise, and they had waited for me. I pulled the zipper up all the way to my throat and then gave the door a push to force it shut. Down by the shore, a long figure of black plastic tarp was being slowly unrolled by the careful hands of Zach and Saroyan, trying not to disturb the remains but trying to get to see what they actually were.

"She beat us here, and she was in a truck!" Brennan complained to Booth, pointing ahead at Saroyan. She wasn't loud enough to be heard from this distance.

"Well, you know, you're the one who wanted to go through Grafton," Booth reminded her to take the fault off of himself.

Brennan fixed her jaw and started to glare, but then she just frowned. "Well, you could have used the siren," she reminded, refusing to let it rest as being her fault. "Why do you have one if you're not going to use it?"

Booth held up the tape above his head and let Brennan and I duck underneath before he pulled it over himself and then let it fall back down at about waist-level where it was tied. The texture of the ground changed; I had less traction under my shoes as I went from walking on grass and soil to walking on sand and rough, small rocks that had been battered and eroded. From here, a wind was blowing across the bay that brought with it the smell of saltwater and the always-lovely stench of decay.

Booth groaned loudly and pinched his nose shut. "What's that smell?" He whined with a nasally voice while we joined the two Jeffersonian members already by the corpse.

"Really?" I asked, a little amazed that he still even had to ask. I'd gotten used to the odor by the time I'd done half a dozen of these things. It still wasn't _nice,_ but at least I knew what it was. "You've been doing this for years and you still don't recognize the lovely aroma of decomposition?"

Booth stared at me and un-pinched his nose. "I'm usually pretty used to your sarcasm," he said slowly, staring at me oddly for my insincerely positive description. "But right now I'm just going to _assume_ that's what it is. I don't think I can, you know, mentally comprehend that as sincerity."

"Zach," Saroyan called to get the intern's attention, and Zach looked away from watching Booth and I while he was crouched down with his weight baring on his ankles to see what the pathologist wanted. "I need some sterile tubes before she's fertilizer."

So, I had been a bit wrong about not needing a pathologist. While most of the flesh had already gone through various processes and most of the bones were visible, if not very sharply pronounced by skin that had melted in hot temperatures and high humidity, there was still a lot of flesh and meat. I was glad I wouldn't be the one digging around in the putrefied mess for the internal organs. The plastic wrap that kept the bones all in one piece had let the remains last a little longer, although it hadn't been much help for the extremities, seeing as how it only had one leg.

Booth stared down and exhaled deeply, looking up at the sky in the soft expression of nature that roughly contrasted the corpse at his feet. Not taking any pause the way that Booth sometimes needed do, Brennan squatted down with her elbows on her thighs and looked over the victim, seeing what she could find with the flesh still obstructing the view of the skeleton. I moved around Booth to get further down the body and then knelt so a knee sank a few inches into sand wetted from the tide.

"Caucasian," Brennan decided.

"Female," I added, going strongly off of the shape of the pubic symphysis.

"Twenty-five to thirty…"

"Definitely pregnant before she died." I nodded and looked up at Booth to see his reaction. So far it was looking like we'd found Carlie Richardson, or at least someone with the same general description.

He looked very meaningfully at the mass of what used to be a person and the very flat stomach where meat had sunken in and decomposed. "How can you tell that just from looking?"

I waved my hand over the pubic bones held scrappily together by the remaining muscle tissue and the pressure of the decaying tissues. "The bones in the pelvis shift in pregnant women to permit easier childbirth," I explained. The idea seemed weird, but in actuality, once you thought about it, it was pretty cool. The human body could rearrange its internal structures without external trauma. And, of course, the shift was so gradual that it wasn't supposed to hurt, or even necessarily be noticed by the pregnant mothers. "It's not too hard to notice when you have a frame of reference."

"Barnacle and small muscle incrustation indicates she's been in the water for about a year," Brennan decided, going off of her best estimate. I had no idea where Hodgins was. Brennan was kind of stealing his thunder.

 _"_ _They_ have," Saroyan called, knelt with her head bowed over another part of the plastic shroud. As she pulled it back, very careful not to disturb what it had been wrapped around, it became quickly apparent why she'd changed the pronoun.

"God," Booth exclaimed, looking ill. The remains of an infant were there, too. Having a much lower mass than its mother, the baby had even less flesh.

All Brennan had to do was look over to make a judgment call on the bones. "Size of the fetal bones indicates this fetus was viable."

"How could someone _do_ this to their own kid?" Booth questioned, shaking his head in disgust at the murderer.

I looked at Brennan across the body, shifting some of my weight back to my knee and feeling it sink deeper into the sand when pins and needles started creeping into my foot. Booth was making a pretty hasty assumption there – either he guessed the woman had murdered her own child and buried it with herself or he was accusing the husband without any evidence. Her weary look in return told me very well that she understood that Booth was setting himself up with a suspect before the case had even begun.

"I dunno," I answered with a shrug, choosing to give him a moment to grieve for the unnamed kid before I started nitpicking on his preconceptions. He always had a hard time with the child victims – he took it worse than anyone else did. "Ask Andrea Yates." Booth frowned. Brennan cocked her head. Even Saroyan looked up, not understanding the reference, but Zach had gone off to the truck he came in to get the supplies Saroyan had asked for to take samples and salvage the integrity of the remains as they'd been found before transport. "She drowned her kids," I explained shortly.

Fixing onto that let Booth distract himself from the miniature person in the plastic. "I'm concerned that you know that," he informed, pointing at me. "Would these things show up in your Google history?"

"I took a cue from Hodgins and set my Google history to automatically delete itself," I told him smugly, smiling like I knew something he didn't. I actually did have my phone set in an in cognito internet tab, but that was mostly for my own privacy. It's not a lack of trust in the familiar faces around me as much as it is my own independence. I don't have a laptop, so I use my phone to do my electronic management – banking, online orders, emails, et cetera.

"Great, just what the world needs," the agent rolled his eyes. "Another conspiracy nut job."

Zach came back across the little stretch of beach, carrying a black nylon bag that I assumed held whatever Saroyan had told him to get. I straightened my back to hold myself a little higher, feigning offense. "Excuse me, but 'theorist' is the more politically-correct term."

Having missed the humor leading up to this, Zach moved past my remark and lowered himself carefully to his knees, hands on his thighs and leaning forward, eyes roving intently over what of the bones he could see. "Multiple fractures… they could be from an assault, or from being battered by rocks and debris while in the water. Stab wounds evident on ribs, manubrium, and clavicle," he reported, and Booth scoffed.

Yeah, the stab wounds were pretty obvious. The blood had been washed away (plastic wraps aren't exactly watertight) but the skin still had nasty slits in the flesh. At least my stab wound had actually healed, which this woman had never had the chance to do.

"And ulna," Brennan added, touching just the very edge of the left radius with very gentle fingers, doing as little alterations to the scene as possible. "Radius… one to the sphenoids-"

"That sounds bad," Booth interrupted, not writing it down. If it was on the body, it would be in several reports anyway, and he would get the full, comprehensive injury list then.

"It was," I confirmed, agreeing wholeheartedly with his simplistic statement. "Aside from the few obvious exceptions, I don't think I've seen a homicide this violent before. Just one of the well-placed ones would have killed her, given time. Can someone say 'overkill?'" I looked around, almost expecting Zach to respond with a candid "yes" or even the word "overkill."

"Find the murder weapon?" Booth moved on before anyone had the chance, and I wasn't going to lie – I was a little disappointed.

"Not yet." Saroyan had to squint, what with the sun behind Booth at the angle she was at, and she waved over at a CSU van. "Scoop guys just got here."

"Tell them to look for a left leg and missing fetal bones," Brennan advised, not taking her eyes off of the body which had at least ninety-one percent of her concentration.

"Looks like we finally get to put Richardson away," Saroyan declared with a slightly exaggerated sigh of relief. "I love being a hero," she added to Booth with a smirk.

"A heroine," Brennan amended for her automatically.

The pathologist made a face that Brennan wasn't looking to see. "Sounds too druggy," she dismissed. I jeered in my head. That was at least two-thirds of why it was fun to say. "I'm going with hero."

"Yes, it's always heroic to publicly announce the death of a woman and her kid," I sharply said, turning my head to glare at her. What does she think makes her a hero? Audibly declaring that she's convinced the husband did it, with no real evidence to go off of? Happily announcing that a woman who may or may not be Carlie and a child that may or may not be Carlie's are both dead? That seems like a jerk thing to do in my book.

"It will be to her family," Saroyan returned on me, and my glare just got more intense. How could _she_ know that? "How do you think they feel about not knowing what happened to her?"

 _I don't have to think. I already know._ "The confirmation is worse than the uncertainty," I told her stonily, remembering the first couple of nights when I had stared at the ceiling or out the window and the time I heard Aaron crying in his bedroom and pretended I was asleep so I wouldn't have to go comfort him. I still felt bad for that. Maybe if he hadn't felt alone, he wouldn't have enlisted. Or maybe I should focus on remembering how I used to hate that they had left me but hope that they were okay, because everyone left me so it was hardly a big deal anymore, and it might be mean but it certainly didn't warrant their deaths.

"That's pretty deep from a minor." Saroyan watched me, challenging me. Damn it, and I _knew_ she knew about McVicar and how we found Brennan's mother and my foster parents, and she was still going out of her way to press the buttons that didn't need to be pressed.

"I know better than you think," I all but growled. Finally, Zach could tell that there was tension. When my voice reached a new level of anger, he looked up, saw my stormy expression, took a look at Saroyan's even and cool composure, and then slowly sat up, leaning as far away from the body and the strange circle we had almost formed around it as he could without moving his knees back. "And that's _assuming_ that this is Carlie Richardson. Dentals and medical history will be needed to confirm."

Saroyan pursed her lips and then nodded. "On that, I'll agree." With the press mere yards away and with other people around on the crime scene that could hear us, she wasn't willing to start a scene. I wasn't sure I had what it took to deal with it if she had made it into one, so I was thankful.

That is, until she got a little tool like dentists use to scrape the plaque from teeth and started taking it to the right clavicle.

Brennan threw her arm out and leaned so far to the side that she went off-balance and one of her knees planted right into the beach. "Whoa, whoa, what are you doing?" She demanded, blocking the woman's way back to the bone with her arm aggressively.

"Scraping the adipocere from the hand," she said, bewildered.

My eyebrows went up and joined my hairline. "Scraping the adipocere can also scrape the bones, compromising the integrity of not only the evidence, but the conclusions drawn in our reports," I told her stressfully. This didn't seem complicated. See, this is why the people who have been working on this team the longest should get to call the shots. Brennan and Hodgins would know what to do and what not to do for the best results – except one of them wasn't here and the other was being repeatedly told that she was no longer the boss.

"You should use suction back at the lab," Brennan suggested, but kept her hand hovering in the way to force Saroyan back again if she didn't listen. She watched cagily for a sign that defensive action would be needed. "It's almost no risk to the bones, and you'll get all of the soil." She paused, then took her arm away. "If you want a conviction," she added almost carelessly.

 _Ooh._ Nice. "Your call, _boss,"_ I said with a little bit – oh, who was I kidding. A lot of – spite.

Booth put both of his hands up and literally took a step back from the situation. "Whoa," he chuckled anxiously. "Are we gonna have another murder here or what?"

"Ah, you'd shoot someone before it got out of hand," I said dismissively, far more interested in what the tempered coroner's response was going to be. She looked very terse, like the last two sentences said to her had really gotten her riled up and she was trying very hard to be the bigger person.

After a few seconds, she managed to convince herself that it wouldn't kill her to smile and it would not look good for the newspapers to have photographs of the Jeffersonian's new boss throttling her employees. "That's really not necessary," she told Booth, sounding a little too upbeat for the context. "I have the utmost respect for the doc. I'm glad she works for me."

She didn't say a thing about respect or gratitude towards me, and that was irksome. Yes, Brennan is far more qualified and therefore more reliable for accuracy, but I deserve an acknowledgment, too. I put a lot of work into being an active and helpful part of the investigations, as I've proven, and yet I just get dismissed and distrusted. And, self-deprecatingly, I caught myself thinking without any surprise that of _course_ she wasn't going to say she was happy to have me working for her – I'd been doing so well at not putting myself down, even in my own thoughts, quite as much as I used to, and I loathed that Saroyan could put me back into those habits without even _saying_ anything.

I guess not saying enough was just as bad as saying too much.

"Good," Booth relaxed, not realizing the emotional battle between frustration and fury that was going on, and in the meantime, calm irritation had settled in as my default expression. "And, you know, the clothes match the ones she was last seen wearing. The rope could be a match to the type found in Ricahrdson's house. While you do your thing, I'm gonna go bring the son of a bitch in."

"Take some backup," I advised, looking up and snapping out of my internal lockdown. Booth paused and paid attention, turning back to face the four of us. "The press is already on this," I reminded, motioning out towards the news van with the station name painted along the side. "It's being televised. If he sees it, he'll know the police will come question him. With the accusations from last time, he's not going to appreciate being dragged in again." I warned.

Booth mulled it over for about seven seconds (I wasn't counting) and then he beckoned for me to get up. "Richardson's place isn't far from here. I'll have to wait longer for backup. Why don't you come be my backup?"

I started to look to Saroyan, interested to see exactly how eager she was to get rid of me.

Pretty eager, it turned out; "Go on," she told me, nodding to Booth and his invitation. "We've got it covered here."

 _I'm supposed to be part of this team, not some convenient firepower._ It was the exact opposite of what I used to feel, and I felt the opposite, too – I used to be sadly resigned, but now I was indignant and incensed. This is my home, and she was slowly shoving me out of it. What was she trying to do? Remind everyone that someone like me isn't supposed to have a place with people like them?

Brennan saw me hesitate, but I really don't think she understood the extent of what was going on in my head. "It's alright," she assured me thoughtfully. "You haven't gotten your gloves on yet." Meaning I shouldn't touch evidence yet anyway. "You can join us back at the lab as soon as you're done with Booth and run an inventory with Zach."

Lately I'd noticed that when I was more upset than usual, they had a tendency to say I could work with Zach specifically, or mention his name. It was like they'd _finally_ realized that my temper had a soft spot for the undergrad – which was really not good, because I had a reputation to uphold. I couldn't start getting soft or soon everyone would expect leeway.

"'Kay, Dr. Brennan." I went when Brennan told me to without hesitation, and hopefully it rubbed in Saroyan's face exactly how much stock I put in her leadership. Then, just to add to the backhanded slap that my behavior was, I added over my shoulder, "Who knows, maybe I'll be shot at again."

I wasn't going to let her treat me like a kid. I wouldn't give her the opportunity.

* * *

Booth didn't even bother with the time-consuming nicety of knocking on the door, instead trying the handle right off the bat. It was unlocked, so he counted to three silently. I read his lips and understood, standing back a few feet. Booth threw the door open with a slam as it hit the adjacent wall and stormed the entry.

The trailer that Richardson was last noted to be living in was very small, only housed two people, and smelled like some sea-scented Febreeze spray and citrusy perfume. In the small kitchen that the mobile house was afforded, a frightened woman stood sobbing by the sink, the water still running and steam rising from the dishes, holding a dish cloth to her face. It didn't seem the most sanitary, since she'd probably been using it to do dishes, but her cheeks were bright pink and her eyes puffy.

"Where's Richardson?!" Booth shouted to get her attention, aiming his gun around. She saw and big brown eyes turned away, anxiety tripling in mere seconds.

There was a small television on the counter, visible from both the sink and the small, two-person table between the kitchen and the main living room, which consisted of a small couch with two cushions and a reclining armchair for seating and a coffee table with a crack in the glass. The T.V. set was turned on and tuned into a local news station, a brunette female reporting into a microphone with an all-capital headline scrolling in the subtitle bars.

 _"_ _The body of a mother and child, thought to have been killed last…_ "

I ignored it. It was just the media, but it proved my point.

"Uh, I don't, I don't know," the girl cried, bawling and scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of her free hand. Her hair was obviously dyed – not because it didn't look nice, but because her roots were beginning to show, and they were not bright blonde. "He – He saw this and then h-he took off, I tried to stop him but then he hit me!" She took the cloth away from her face to show us. Her lip was torn in the center, hit and split by her own teeth, and blood was staining her teeth and lips and making the blue dish towel purple. "He said he's never coming-" She interrupted herself with a teary hiccup. "Coming back…"

 _"_ _Sources indicate both the mother and her fetus were stabbed to death. Kyle Richardson remains the chief suspect."_

I rolled my eyes. Reporters. I hate that they seem to have the absolute worst timing. If they had been, like, ten minutes later in running their story, then this woman wouldn't be hysterically crying with a bloody mouth and the supposed chief suspect would actually be in custody.

"I told you, Booth," I said aloud, glowering hatefully at the television.

* * *

 **A/N: Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	7. Mother and Child in the Bay, Part Two

Booth came into the autopsy room, where we were all congregated with the dead woman's body on the large steel table, carrying a hefty-looking white cardboard box. "Cam, this is the evidence taken from Kyle Richardson's house a year ago." I looked away from Zach to Booth. He looked at the body, blinked, and then set the box down at the top of the table, far enough away from the skull to be safe. "So we've got the rope, the plastic sheeting, the knife set with one knife missing, and Richardson's D.N.A. results…"

"The file says witnesses placed Richardson at the marina on the bay the night that she disappeared." Saroyan didn't need to look at the file on top of the box in order to confirm it. She put her hands on her hips, looking over the dead body at Booth confidently. "Looks like he's not walking this time, Seeley."

"Ironic," Hodgins chose the time to be snarky, looking at Zach and trying to inspire a reaction in his friend. "Since he's running now."

I snickered, because I thought that it was funny, but Booth's eyes travelled to Hodgins, landed firmly on the entomologist, and he stalked towards our side of the autopsy lab, hands at his sides and one of them looking dangerously close to his sidearm.

Angela noticed. "Hodgins, you know Booth is bigger than you, right?"

"He handled the case the first time around," I told the shorter man. While intellectually more than a match for the FBI agent, when it came to physical fighting, I couldn't see Hodgins winning any time soon. Being his height put him at just under the majority of the women in the Jeffersonian, which seemed to bother him on and off.

Bemused, he quickly understood when he saw the pissed off look that Booth was sending him, along with the closeness of his hand to his weapon. "Right," he hastily said, plastering on an earnest look and pretending he hadn't just made jokes about the failed conviction. I wanted to think that Booth was overreacting, but I didn't think I understood entirely what it felt like, and if Howard Epps hadn't already been in prison, I'd have been more than willing to hospitalize him so he would pay for what he'd done. I imagined Booth felt the same, especially with a murder involving a pregnant woman. "Wasn't your fault, dude."

Booth started to relax. Hodgins says a lot of things that not all people would take well, which was actually part of the reason I took to him. I had been comfortable around Hodgins before I felt safe around Angela, despite the artist's more sociable and kind disposition, and while part of it definitely came from feeling like I could kick the smaller man's ass if I needed to, a large part of it was also that I appreciated how he very clearly said what he thought, sometimes trying to ruffle feathers.

Whether intentionally or not, Saroyan intervened before Hodgins could manage to throw himself deeper into the grave he'd just dug. "Let's focus, people," she sternly said, looking around at all of us as if we didn't do commendable work on every case. "This should be a slam dunk. We screw this one up, I'm gonna look like a fool, and someone's gonna have to pay for that."

Suddenly I found myself losing a lot of enthusiasm for working both in the lab and in the field. If it weren't for the rational side of my brain, I would probably make all of my decisions based on spite alone. "Or, conversely, we could care less about politics and more about what actually happened." I sounded snide, but this was an institute for science, not for the government (even if it technically was a federal building). I met Saroyan's eyes and hoped she'd see my point and rescind her statement. "Enough innocent people are convicted as it is, Dr. Saroyan, and I'd like to refrain from adding this team to the list of responsible parties."

Saroyan folded her arms, pausing in the action for only long enough to make a sweeping, wide gesture towards Booth's evidence box. "We already have boxes of evidence on this rat," she assured me before tucking her arms both to her chest. Strangely enough, I wasn't reassured. "The remains are just the icing on the cake."

Something reminded me that it was a similar situation to Howard Epps – I had been completely convinced of his guilt even before examining the bodies we'd found – but a psychopath on death row is a far cry from a troubled husband who may be unhappy with his wife's pregnancy. Even my survival instincts wanted me away from Epps; I doubted my subconscious would be saying anything about Richardson, unless I wanted to punch him in the face for saying something stupid.

"If they're only icing, then how come Richardson walked?" I inquired smartly, ringing a little bell in my head. _Point for Kirkland._

The quiet pause before she opened her mouth to respond was probably clue enough that I may have irked her a bit too much, but I wasn't prepared for the subtly condescending way she addressed me. "This isn't a source of conflict, _Miss_ Kirkland." I tightened my jaw and sucked on the inside of my cheek, narrowing my eyes at her. She remained perfectly poker-faced, a skill I should learn to work on. "This is a simple matter of real-life crime. For all purposes, Richardson looks like the guilty party. Witnesses and evidence place him there. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Mallard or domestic, doesn't matter to me. Let's just get this done and hand the prosecutor what she needs, so I can have a nice weekend knockin' back shots and playing poker, and you can go back to the fingerprinting kits and detective shows."

In the quiet that fell when she was done talking, everyone's attitude shifted, the way they held themselves changing as it seemed like we were gearing up for a fight. I knew I clawed at her patience, but she had yet to be so rude to me, and my jaw fell open, unable to believe that she'd told me that in any capacity – much less in the middle of the institution with other people around to hear.

By emphasizing my title as _miss_ over _doctor_ or _agent,_ she'd been making a remark about my inexperience and what she felt was lack of grounds to stand on. Then she'd gone and implied that I spent my free time playing with children's kits and learning my job from a television? Did she think I made up what I said to suspects or in the lab, quoting off of some late-night police procedural? Does she think that somehow, after a long time of doing this, I haven't managed to figure out for myself how a _real_ crime works? This is the longest I've ever contently stayed in any one place for as long as I can remember, even with the rough patches, and damn it, this is _my_ home, and I won't be undermined when, as far as I'm concerned, I've proven myself more than she has.

It takes superior dedication to be repeatedly beaten up and almost murdered for the sake of strangers, which I've been doing pretty often, while she gets to spend her time with dead bodies and paperwork. The most dangerous thing she has to do is talk to people so boring she might actually consider scratching her eyes out for a reason to leave.

I had thought that there was a line neither of us were supposed to cross. I didn't care much for her socially, and I questioned her motives too often for her to be really okay with, but I had never, not once, undermined her capability or questioned her competence. All of her credentials check out, and I know you don't get to the Jeffersonian because you have a well-known name or a lot of big words. And now she was doing that to me, dismissing me in front of not just my friends, but the people I worked with. I may have been pushing her a little too much to pass it off as social inaptitude, but that was extremely offensive, and I could appreciate playing dirty, but hadn't Booth _told_ her that I prefer upfront confrontation? I knew he had. I'd been eavesdropping.

 _Of course she said it,_ I thought. Frustratingly, I was more bitter than indignant. She'd hinted at feeling like that since we first met and she directed me to assist the paramedics over becoming forensically involved. _She's politically aware, not politically reliant._ Just because politics had played a hand in helping me into the Jeffersonian didn't mean that Saroyan had to listen to it or respect the stories.

Booth suddenly regained the ability to speak. He looked more surprised than I did at what the woman was saying to me. "Um, Cam-"

Brennan interrupted him, impolite where he was going for peaceful, diplomatic resolution. "Yeah, _that_ should motivate us," she sarcastically said with a long roll of her eyes. She never did like it when her coworkers were slighted.

As if having the two of them defend me against the new boss wasn't enough, they weren't the only ones. Angela folded her hands together in front of her and looked over the autopsy table, dismissing the corpse that used to have her trying not to look in that direction. "All due respect, Dr. Saroyan," she said, and halted for a second to let it occur to the pathologist that she said that for appearances, not for respect. "But could you please not talk down to her like that? I know you haven't been here long, but Holly's been with us for a long time now, and she doesn't deserve to be patronized."

On some level I might've been expecting the others to concur, but I was pleasantly surprised that none of them seemed to have the same opinion as the coroner. In fact, I realized, if anyone was going to take my side, it would be Angela. She had qualifications for technology, but not specifically for forensic artistry or recreation.

Hodgins scoffed. "And considering that she was _stabbed_ the last time less than one hundred percent of the evidence was taken into account, her view is totally reasonable." He sounded annoyed on my behalf. Having been one of the two people to have seen me dangling from a hook and surrounded by dogs, he was also one of the people hit hardest by my near-murder. It didn't show very often, but occasionally he'd do or say something that plainly informed he hadn't come close to forgetting about it.

A look at Zach showed that he was nodding along with what Hodgins was saying, but he was watching Saroyan's face uncertainly. Zach is nearly petrified when threatened by authority, so this mutiny on my behalf was unexpected.

I kept my mouth shut when I looked back to Saroyan. There were other things I could have said – underhanded comments, backhanded remarks – but everyone else was defending me sufficiently. I didn't need her insulted for her to realize she'd been wrong to say something like that out loud. Jumping back in, continuing to defend myself when my team was doing that job already, seemed unnecessary – devaluing, even.

After several seconds in which it seemed like she was considering how to handle the situation, she dipped her head diplomatically towards Hodgins, the last to have spoken. "You're right, Dr. Hodgins." She lifted her eyes to meet my questioning gaze. "I don't need you to think of me as an enemy, Miss Kirkland." This time, there wasn't a bite with my title. "I don't want any of the good guys locked up any more than you do. Maybe I need to be more aware of the way I phrase my statements. I apologize. My comment was undue."

Knowing of her what I did, it seemed like that as the best apology I could get, so it was succinct enough for me. I nodded in agreement, both that I would take it and move past the matter, and that hell yes, she'd gone after me professionally and she can't do that. I need to be able to testify in court, and how can I do that if she undermines me all the time?

Saroyan chose to move on quickly before anything else had the opportunity to take over again. She looked at the body down on the table and snapped the edges of her gloves, like she was using the sounds of the rubber to call the others all back to attention.

"I'm gonna strip the flesh and adipocere, remove anything from under the fingernails," she announced, looking up with a determined flash in her eyes and a little, entertained quirk of her lips, like she knew she wouldn't be bored and she was looking forward to it.

Zach turned to the counter and picked up a stainless steel tray, turning around and holding it towards Hodgins. "There was a dead fish in the plastic." The fish's scales remained glinting dryly in the sharp overhead lighting.

The entomologist's eyes lit up like a child who forgot it was Christmas until he saw the presents underneath the tree. "Ooh!" All too eagerly, he reached out to the tray and stole it away from Zach. "And it's not even my birthday!"

I blinked my eyes and shook my head slightly before shaking myself back into my normal, unshakable attitude and flashed a sardonic smirk at the scientist. "And a very merry un-birthday to you."

"The stomach contents and particulates could give us drift patterns, and show where she was left before she washed ashore." Brennan said it out loud to give Hodgins the idea and looked at him meaningfully. He pouted and looked longingly down at the fish's corpse, disappointed that he'd be relegated to a different priority first.

When I looked back to Saroyan, feeling like things were calming down and settling into their semi-usual patterns, she had one of her hands underneath the ribs and in the lower abdominal cavity, gloved hands deep into the body. "Not much left of the organs," she mused thoughtfully. I looked at her wrist coming out of the corpse thoughtfully, unsure if it was cool or disturbing. "Looks like I can still find a few surprises from what's left of this lung," she added, looking down at what she was doing. "And looks like some liver over here…"

"I'll take any tissue that's stuck to the plastic." Hodgins just couldn't seem to get enough onto his plate, even though he was very excited to look into the either naturally or unnaturally killed fish. To me, it looked like any other silver saltwater fish. "There'll be sediment and organic particulates."

Saroyan pulled her hands temporarily out of the innards. "What do you want?" She asked Angela, holding her hands up. Her gloves were stained dark pink from blood and it dripped down her fingertips, though it looked a lot runnier than most peoples' blood tended to. I thought maybe it could be attributed to extra fluid from decomposing organs.

Angela wasted no time raising her eyebrows sassily. "George Clooney, naked, on a white sand beach." I blinked, then nodded towards her. Not exactly the famous person I'd go for, but eh. "But I can give you faces after the skulls are reconstructed."

"When you've got the soil and tissue off of the skull, I'll get dental x-rays to compare to whatever hits Angela finds, and Zach will start on tissue markers." I looked between Saroyan and Hodgins, as flesh and soil would fall into both of their categories.

"After you've stripped the tissue," Brennan contributed, referring to the tissue over the entire body rather than just the skull. "I'd like to reassemble the victim and the fetus."

I turned around to smile saccharinely at Booth. I was still a little too rattled to be particularly sincere in anything I said at the moment – especially when sincerity was pretty hard for me, even without being antagonized. "And Booth sadly has no job here, but he will happily look into finding Kyle Richardson," I told him.

"Sounds like fun, people." The pathologist made a motion like she was about to clap her hands, as if banging a gavel to dismiss court. Then she glanced at her gloves and thought better of sending droplets of blood flying around. "Let's do it."

Everyone went off do to their jobs in the best way that they could. Angela left the room to go up to her office, giving more space to the rest of the people taking up space in the autopsy room. Hodgins took his dead fish on its tray and started walking it over towards his lab, planning on coming back shortly to collect samples that Brennan and Saroyan would be taking off of the body. Both women went to work, Brennan getting samples and Saroyan de-organ-ing the victim, taking the internal pieces and setting them in stainless steel vats to run tests on and conserve.

I rubbed my hands together, friction from my bare palms heating up my skin, and I let out a long sigh. Until Brennan and Saroyan were finished, there wasn't much I could do without getting in the way, which only made me feel a little too useless.

I turned around to see Booth, thinking maybe I could speculate with him on how to find the suspect and feel a little more useful. Instead, I saw him standing with his back half to me, not paying attention to any of the three of us. One hand in the pocket of his black trousers and the other fist up to his chin, he was staring at the smaller, more easily moved exam table on locked wheels at the side of the room. The bones of the underdeveloped fetus were set aside to be observed later, but Booth seemed to be doing his best to observe them now.

I took a few steps to him. I didn't need to take many because it was still a fairly small room, but I didn't take very long strides, wanting to give him the sounds of my footsteps to know I was coming up to his side.

"It was male," I offered quietly, wondering if maybe he was thinking too deeply into it. I didn't really know what I was supposed to tell him in order to convince him not to let it bother him. Booth is probably the most emotionally sensitive person here, excluding Angela, so there was little that could be said to make it better. Unlike with Zach, I couldn't just advise him to compartmentalize.

"He," Booth corrected me, after just a pause the length of a second. "Not 'it.'"

I looked to the side. Comforting Booth was never something I'd considered myself good at doing. Hell, comforting in general wasn't my forte by any stretch of the imagination, but with Booth it was even harder. He had always tried to comfort me whenever he thought I needed it – and was even more attentive to my temperament since the disaster with Kenton. While knowing that he was concerned at least made me feel a little less alone, it wasn't as easy to tell what kind of comfort he needed. Solitude? Company? Verbal reassurance, silent companionship, physical affection?

It's like when I was a kid and I wouldn't appreciate when any policeman or uniformed official, no matter how friendly or how safe the context, asked me a question, and I never knew if I was giving the right answer (even if I was telling the truth).

"Remember when Zach told you it was easier to depersonalize?" I asked, thinking back to when he had just been getting past his initial irritation where the squint squad was concerned in general. Zach was one of my favorites, I'd learned, where comfort was considered a two-way street. He showed worry, but never bothered to push. He had already established that he would listen – and he was a good listener, I just had to be careful how I phrased things – but he saw no point in trying to bother me to share if I clearly didn't want to. And he was much easier to reassure, because he didn't look for double meanings in my words, and thought much more rationally. It was never really a battle between what I should say versus what I thought he wanted to hear. "He wasn't kidding. Don't think about it as a kid that might've been. Yours is safe, and right now, that's what you need to remember."

I started to raise my hand to his shoulder, but stopped and thought better of it. I was frustrated with myself for a moment. More and more, my discomfort with physical contact was seeming less like a necessary defense and more like an understandable, but annoying, issue. My body no longer associated touch with abuse, but while the occasional hug-while-dying or the arms-around-sideways-hug-when-severely-emotionally-distressed seemed alright, the casual expressions were still being held back.

"Yeah." I dropped my hand before Booth noticed. That was a personal matter that I needed to work on – and first, I needed to consider if it was even an issue worth actually focusing on. Clearly, my restraint was lessening with time anyway. "Both of them are." He looked down to me with a bit too much familial protection and I rolled my eyes. Though touched, I'm not very comfortable with displays of affection.

Unfortunately for him, he looked over my shoulder at just the time that Saroyan was pulling out another internal organ, and his face quickly morphed again to horror.

"Oh, God. You guys don't really need me here anymore, do you?"

Cam grinned. "Still squeamish?" She asked conversationally, depositing a mass of tissue into a vat.

"I'm gonna go talk to his girlfriend," he announced, disgruntled, refusing to dignify the teasing by actually arguing it. "No mistakes on this one."

He left me standing here, torn between laughing and still being internally frustrated, and either way, I didn't feel comfortably relaxed enough around Saroyan to laugh, so I fisted my hands subtly at my sides, hoped no one noticed, and then lifted my arms to cross in front of me.

Cam paused, looking after him as if measuring him up to the man she remembered. "He always was a little touchy," she reminisced.

Brennan looked after him, but seemed mostly unaffected. "Yeah," she agreed halfheartedly.

* * *

"There's another gash on the second rib, right side." Brennan picked it up and held it over the edge of the table, a few inches of space between the bone and the angle perpendicular to it. Angela dutifully wrote down the information on a notepad she brought with her with her black ink pen. "Approximately forty-five degrees, left to right."

Illustratively, Brennan held the rib bone up so there was a clear view of it and used her other hand to grip a space in the air that was supposed to be a mime of holding a knife and imitated the motion that would have carved up the bone.

Angela wrote it down like she was supposed to, but then she stared at the skeleton and shook her head, unable to just write it off as numbers and data like Brennan did to compartmentalize. "Why didn't he just _divorce_ her?" She asked the obvious question.

And, of course, she was assuming that Richardson was the killer, leaping up on that bandwagon and maybe not even realizing consciously as she did it, while I sighed and felt more than a little defeated that my party of "innocent until proven guilty" only seemed to consist of me and my roommate. "Lawyers are expensive," I reminded her facetiously instead of getting worked up at my friend for her assumption. I was fighting with Cam, but I liked Angela too much, and I trusted the artist's integrity because I knew that she wouldn't see a man be incarcerated if the evidence, when collected, wasn't consistent.

Carefully, Brennan replaced the rib bone in between the others around it. "Why did they have to get _married_ in the first place?" She asked shortly, saying 'married' the same way someone else might say 'divorced.' "It's an antiquated ritual. Carlie Richardson believed in it, trusted her husband, and look what happened."

"Not necessarily her husband," I coughed into my arm. I needed at least _one_ person in my canoe that wasn't me.

"So this is _marriage's_ fault?" Angela gathered from Brennan, holding her notebook flat to her stomach and canting her head in anticipating of an interesting, entertaining discussion.

Brennan has never been a big fan of the idea of long-term monogamy, and especially not legal commitment beyond the relationships of parent and child. I almost blamed it on what she saw from her parents, but her memories of them involved a relatively happy family before they left, and their marriage had very little to do with the _reason_ she had been abandoned. I wasn't sure what else to attribute it to. I wasn't completely fixated on the idea that I would be in Brennan's life for years to come, but I did like to think that I knew her fairly well for the amount of time that we had been friends. There was just also a lot that I was missing.

"Committing yourself to one person isn't in the interest of the species," Brennan rationalized. "I mean, you have multiple partners."

"Um," Angela looked decently offended before she smoothed down the ruffled feathers, knowing that Brennan hadn't said it realizing that it could be taken badly. "I _date,_ " she corrected.

"But under population is really not an issue," I reminded Brennan, challenging her to come up with a better primary reason. You see all those signs and advertisements about the babies in China, the rules in Asia that limited parents to a certain number of offspring, you hear about how it was at one point acceptable to murder your daughters if you wanted sons instead. That's just in _China_. There was an entire _world_ full of children that needed homes; the species wasn't really endangered. "What's the downfall of monogamy to the species as a whole, if not for reproductive purposes?"

And that I did kind of get, empirically, but the idea of men strutting around and getting as many women knocked up as they could for the survival of the species had me torn between scoffing in convoluted amusement and disgust. There was a precedent for behavior made by society, and a man siring several children through several women at the same time was frowned upon. For good reason, too, because child support is a thing, and it's just rude to be partly responsible for the creation of a life and then not be held accountable.

Brennan pursed her lips, knowing I had made a good point about overpopulation. She came up with something else to take its place. "Monogamy is a social construct designed to withhold the structure of a community by demanding commitment in practically all areas of life. In addition, monogamous relationships are looked upon in many countries as the only permissible kind of legal, sexual relationship, and polyamory is strictly outlawed."

"So you're voting for polyamory now?" Angela gleaned lightheartedly, since she clearly wasn't pro-monogamy.

I wished there was a chair just so that I could sit down and focus on what this was developing into. I hadn't expected it to take this turn, but having an interest in alternative lifestyles, polyamory was an interesting option. I had no first- or secondhand experience beyond what I happened to see online.

"This is actually getting fascinating," I said, impressed. "Have you ever been polyamorous, Dr. Brennan?"

"I have only a few times taken more than one partner at a time," she admitted. Not intending for it to be a big deal, she missed Angela's widening eyes and my grin. It was a little more than I wanted to know, but I had always appreciated her unhesitating willingness to treat me as she would a friend her age, and I shouldn't pick and choose about what she deems appropriate to tell me when it's part of a conversation about something more generalized than her personal experiences. "But not for the purpose of a serious relationship," she finished.

"Then that's not the kind that counts for this argument," I mildly responded. We were debating the merits of monogamy, and a _ménage-a-trois_ that wasn't made up of people who were long-term partners didn't fit the bill. "And if your argument is with commitment, then the illegalization of polyamory doesn't exactly make your point. Some vary in commitment, just like monogamous ones. Some have closed polycules and others are open to individuals having anything from one-night-stands to steady significant others."

From the perspective of someone who had never done the whole dating scene, too young to take an interest when I was in the setting where it was expected and too busy with other concerns once I was actually at a point where I could feasibly be interested, polyamory was intriguing. I understood the value in having one person that you get to call yours and trust to be loyal and faithful and devoted, but really, wouldn't it be better in some instances to have more than one person to call on? In the event of injury, conflicting schedules, counsel, confidants, travel, work, and even just the different compatibilities on different topics and worldviews, having more than one person to confide in that you could also trust on an emotionally intimate level seemed appealing on paper.

Brennan insisted on her point. Because her approach wasn't working, she tried a new tactic of evidence against monogamy, rather than theoretical, anthropological refutes. "The notion of a committed relationship is fantasy. Look at Booth! Fighting with his ex, his son caught in the middle…"

"No," I protested. _A committed relationship is fantasy?_ "Committed relationships happen all the time. You and Angela, Booth and Parker… not all commitment has to be sexual or romantic." The idea that all commitment was doomed to fail was distressing. I could accept that some relationships would have to end, but what about the ones that were supposed to last? I don't want to go through friends and family figures the same way that the kids on _Glee_ went through significant others. "Parker's not just a statistic of kids suffering from the pitfalls of monogamy," I said, a little miffed just at the thought of reducing Booth's relationship with Rebecca to something that was a long fight and a custody battle. It was a lot more complex than that; even I got that part.

For a second she looked puzzled by the change in my tone, but then Brennan transitioned to genuine apology. "I… apologize if using your family as an example bothered you," she offered sympathetically, mistaking what had gotten under my skin. "But they are, to an extent, a realistic example."

… Yeah. They were. Booth was one in a large number of ex-boyfriends who wasn't together with the mother of his child. It was fitting for the argument. It just wasn't appropriate to dumb down the relationships of Booth and Rebecca like that, not when I knew them, not when I knew how important that very relationship had been to Booth not very long ago.

"I'm not arguing that," I said after taking a deep breath, clenching my fists and then stretching my fingers out. "I'm not even upset." I had very little to be upset over; it was such a small thing and nothing was meant by it, and it was always hard to be mad at Brennan. "My problem with your reasoning is that you believe monogamy is ridiculous. I believe it's a struggle, but it's possible, and shouldn't be strictly necessary in society."

"Hey, Holly," Angela joined in again with a bright, clever little spark and teasing voice. "Are you polyamorous?"

 _I shouldn't be surprised._ I could almost see it coming in hindsight. "How would I know my personal feelings of practical monogamy or polygamy?" I asked rhetorically, lifting my shoulders helplessly to her. "I've never dated anyone."

I suppose some people would have been embarrassed. I was a seventeen-year-old, almost eighteen-year-old, with a romantic experience that extended to awkward dreams about actors on the television when I watched too much. I couldn't stand the people I met in real life enough to daydream about them, and the hormones had needed somewhere to vent. I just didn't see the shame in being as old as I was without that experience, and I certainly wasn't in any hurry to win social status by giving up my virginity. Hell, I would flip someone over my shoulder for something as small as touching my wrist not that long ago and I still might! Fighting comes easily because it feels natural; _kind_ contact is what feels weird and foreign. Exactly how great would it be for my mental health to push through something as intense and physical as sex when I shrank away from holding hands?

"But," I continued. Just because I didn't have experience myself didn't mean that I couldn't look around and listen and see what was going on around me with other people who were doing those things themselves, and in high school, you had to be blind and deaf to miss it, no matter how old or young you were. "I think that it's kind of silly that groups can't have the same kind of relationships that couples can have without being stigmatized and bullied by conventional traditionalists. If there's consent, communication, and consideration, then it should be their decision what lifestyle they choose. And, in many ways, I think polygamous relationships may have perks to those of monogamists."

As the conversation slowly moved away from monogamy, Brennan had been losing her steam because it wasn't a topic she was quite so impassioned about, but she was still involved and her interest was piqued. "Like?" She asked curiously.

"Like sexual deviation and variation between partners, for one," I said first, because it seemed like it would be a selling point for the women who would loudly and proudly announce when they were going to go have sex on a Friday night and who, according to Angela, had enough pent-up sexual tension to power a small Midwestern city. Yeah, I was never going to forget that one. I went on because there were things equally as and more important than sex. "Compatibility at different levels in different areas, for two. Excess support. Emotional security, venting, involved mediation, varied perspectives… and, where children are concerned, I don't think having more than two trusted guardians is by any means a bad thing."

"You've really thought about this a lot." Angela wasn't teasing as much as she was admiring my thoughtfulness with a smile on her face as she decided it all made sense.

"Society puts a lot of stock in labels," I shrugged distastefully. I had never cared for sticking names and categories on people beyond 'bad person' and 'good person,' and that evolved to 'murderer' and 'innocent' when I started consulting for the Jeffersonian. "Sex, gender, relationship style, sexual orientation – it's all ridiculed and punished. Some people are good with it all, but a lot aren't cool with anything other than monogamous heteronormativity. Others are alright with one unorthodox thing, but take participation in anything else as a personal offense. If no one's being hurt, then nothing should be wrong with any of it."

One person's participation in sodomy was not going to result in any actual suffering for another unless they made it that way. A man being attracted to another man was not going to change his character; whether it's sexual assault on men or women, it should be regarded with the same abhorrence, and if someone's character is that where they will be willing to harass someone, then it's not the sexuality that's wrong, it's the person.

Angela nodded slowly and was clicking her pen, slowly pushing down on the tip and then letting back up quickly, the popping of the springs quiet but growing more noticeable the more it happened. "You're a liberalist."

I made a face at the politics. "I don't consider myself a supporter of any particular political party, but I do have a non-traditional and liberal perspective."

"I agree," the free-spirited artist didn't surprise me in the least, but I did grin a little when she emphatically looked to Brennan and dramatically declared, "Just love _love._ What's the point of feeling it if it can't be expressed?"

"I don't have personal experience with a lot of the aforementioned, but I don't see how anyone uninvolved should be slighted by something they don't personally practice," Brennan agreed.

"So we're all decided," Angela said proudly. The way she said it made me think she was talking about something other than just everyone's individual right to their own life choices and was inferring our agreement rather than actually getting it verbally. "Next Pride Parade, we're all going."

Yep, she was definitely inferring that. "That escalated," I commented, because I had no problem with wearing rainbow colors and supporting peoples' rights, I just certainly hadn't suggested those plans out loud. Well, if nothing else, I could act outrageously metrosexual and exaggerate it tenfold around anyone who acted bigoted.

Zach saved us from any more inferred-consensus plans by coming in uncalled with a tray to carry evidence, some of the bones from the skull that he'd been cleaning on it. The anatomical order was almost complete, but there were a few that had yet to be processed and cleaned off completely, particulates given to Hodgins and all.

"The skulls are in multiple pieces," Zach informed with a sad wince, but that was already known. "But the damage is from debris in the water." That was helpful, it meant we didn't have to factor in head trauma to the murder scenario.

"Then let's start on the stab wounds. I'd like to confirm the type of knife used in each of these." Pointing out her subject, she reached for the rib bone she'd talked to Angela about the most recently and showed Zach before setting it down.

His eyes roamed the skeleton with single-minded focus. "These all appear to be from the knife that was missing from the set taken from Richardson's."

Zach's wording made Brennan's eyebrows raise. _"Appear?"_ She echoed unhappily. Zach frowned and looked to the bones of the cranium, chastened. "No conclusions without corroboration," the anthropologist lightly berated.

"But Dr. Saroyan seems certain that Richardson-" Zach tried to say, not arguing as much as he was explaining why he had departed from the rules that hadn't wavered in the entire time I'd been here.

"Seems?" Unimpressed, Brennan repeated the most offensive word again, and again, Zach looked down and shut up. "You're _my_ grad student," she reminded him. "You work for _me."_

"Remember, Doc," the intrusive pathologist who was in question and convincing Zach to rebel came stalking on in with her infuriating clicking heels, hair let down and brushed straight down her upper back. _It's pretty,_ I grudgingly noted. "We're building a case here, not getting our rocks off on research."

Angela picked up her notebook and covered her mouth with the top edge to conceal her reaction, but her eyes looked insulted for Brennan's behalf and she was probably stopping herself from saying something rude. Zach looked prepared to disappear into the floor any time it would kindly open up to swallow him whole.

I had no reservations such as Angela's, and at the crass and uncalled for phrasing she very casually employed, I heatedly started to raise my voice. "Excuse-"

I didn't get far because Brennan, not realizing there was a reason we were all reacting badly, interrupted me before she noticed that I was about to say something. It was probably for the best. "Rocks and sediment are Hodgins' specialty," she told Saroyan helpfully, confused why she was the one being accused of working with rocks.

Saroyan blinked, and crossed her arms, and stared, her jaw slack. "You're serious?" She asked, her arms flexing, unable to tell from Brennan's voice if she was right to be offended from insolence or if it was an innocent offense. Either way, she had no idea what to make of it, and the fighting that her body went through as she struggled to react with no clue how was more entertaining than even Angela's comment on Brennan's sexual tension and the Midwest.

Although it did nothing to help the situation, I snickered under my breath when too many seconds passed with no one answering each other, neither Brennan or Saroyan understanding what was happening.

"… Okay," Saroyan, unsettled, finally chose to consciously uncross her arms, letting it go. How else was she supposed to handle it? "I found organic materials under the fingernails. Should match Richardson." I narrowed my eyes, humor lost, and started thinking meaningfully, _don't be Richardson. Jesus Christ, if you're listening, do not let the D.N.A. match Richardson._ "And I found something else I'd like you to look at."

Brennan listened for a further explanation. Sassily, Saroyan stared her down for operating on the presumption that Saroyan would actually talk some more and beckoned wordlessly for her to follow, and just expected that she would. Even without being given a decent reason to do so.

* * *

What Saroyan wanted us to look at was a golden shape embedded into an internal organ which had become very watery and rotted. "It's here in the lung," she said quietly while she focused, using glove-clad hands to manipulate a set of small surgical tongs. She peeled back part of the tissue surrounding what was left of the right lung. Something golden and heart-shaped but covered in dried blood and ickiness was stuck in the organ. "It's a locket."

Brennan frowned at it and then looked at the larger image blown up on the screen, magnified to show Saroyan what she was doing without relying on the flaws of human eyesight. "It must've been around her neck and melted into the lung during putrefaction."

Saroyan hummed halfhearted agreement. "Before I remove it, I wanted to see if any of your cyborgs could do anything with the photo paper."

 _We're not cyborgs, we're people,_ I wanted to argue. It was just rude to call us computers because we did this thing called compartmentalizing, or because we were intelligent and didn't care to disguise the fact. She used a pin to push the tissue in place and then used her tongs to un-wedge the necklace pendant from where it was stuck in the decomposing matter. It made a wet sound like a boot being pulled out of mud, and then she set it in a sterile steel tray.

"Angela can try, but by now it's probably too degraded," I warned before she got her hopes up. Lockets weren't usually waterproof, and water does terrible things to paper and color ink.

The pathologist took a bottle of saline safe for evidence and a cotton swab and went to work on getting rid of the gunk on the locket. "It's probably just a picture of the lovebirds anyway," she guessed. "Oh – what's this?"

She stopped what she was doing and took her hands away from the locket, pushing the tray and the magnifying glass both so that the locket showed up on the screen in high definition. Previously obscured on the locket were the now-visible letters spelling out a message engraved on the front: _I love you Kenny._

"Oh, no," Saroyan moaned, covering her eyes with her hand and turning away like she wanted to pretend she hadn't seen it.

Brennan looked confused. "Who's Kenny?" She asked me.

Saroyan held up both of her hands. "I don't know, I don't want to know." She moved away from the locket, troubled by the new lead on the evidence. "I just want it to be Richardson."

"Yes, we're aware," I glared, and reminded her of her own strident dismissal of whatever had been inside the locket. "That photo seems a bit more important now, though, doesn't it?"

* * *

Brennan and I took her car and found parking a couple of blocks away from the Royal Diner. The restaurant wasn't the only destination nearby for locals or tourists, so it wasn't unusual to have to walk part of the way to get there. Luckily for me especially, I was well-used to walking from before I had the means of getting around without paying for taxis.

Booth was already waiting inside, seated up by the bar with his phone out. He glanced at us when he heard the bell over the door, but remained absorbed in his phone call. Brennan signaled for a drink from the waiter on his shift and both of us pulled out empty chairs that were conveniently right to Booth's left, Brennan sitting in the middle.

"Yeah, I know there's a lot of animals at the zoo," Booth said wisely, working himself up to sound excited. I rolled my eyes at the childish tone in a grown man's voice, but kept my mouth shut. Obviously he was talking to a child. My phone was about to fall out of my jeans, so I pushed it further into my pocket and crossed my arms over the table. "The monkeys are Daddy's favorite. Did you see, they're just like people!"

He started to make the "ooh-ooh-ah-ah" noises that monkeys are known for, the enunciation exaggerated like the monkey from _Dora,_ and Brennan looked at him in alarm, as if he was having a seizure. Booth turned away from her, realizing that she thought there was something wrong with him.

She turned to look at me for an answer to his behavior. I just kind of waved it away. Just being an obnoxious and overenthusiastic parent. Actually, being a good and engaging parent, but to me it was just annoying. I'd already dealt with one annoying adult today; I didn't need another, and I had even less patience than usual.

"Actually, three million base pairs of the genome differ in protein coding and other functional areas," Brennan told me, correcting Booth's scientific error.

With a look of complete confusion, he covered the receiver, twisted around, and asked, "What?"

"He's talking to a four-year-old," I told Brennan. Honestly, I wished I could see her interact with children more often. Any kid raised by her would have so much information ahead of their time they probably wouldn't even realize what most of it meant. She didn't like to talk to children like they were kids – she talked to them like they were adults, just… smaller, most of the time, with note of their real-world inexperience. At this point, Booth tuned us out. "Parker won't know what half of those words even mean."

Something that Parker said made Booth's face fall. "Yeah, you're spending a lot of time with Drew, huh? That's great." Even he couldn't manage to sound completely thrilled about that. Whatever Drew had done wrong to personally offend Booth, the agent should learn to separate that from his conversations with his kid. Either avoid the subject entirely or don't talk about it and sound sarcastic. Parker doesn't need to feel like he's caught between his dad and his new friend. "Okay, you've gotta go eat? Okay, go eat. Make sure-" Parker cut him off with something and Booth paused. "Okay, I love-" The phone call must have been cut off as someone hung up on him, because he grimaced without finishing. "… Yeah."

The waiter delivered a glass of water with ice cubes to Brennan and left a condensed trail of droplets on the counter. She pulled a napkin out of one of the dispensers at the edge of the counter and wiped it up, then wrapped the napkin around her glass to pull it closer without getting her hand wet.

"New boyfriend spending a lot of time with your son?" She asked, trying to make conversation before she took the straw into her mouth.

"Yeah," he said despondently, turning the phone over and glaring at the screen with the flashing call time. "So, you got any new information for me, Bones?" Shaking it off physically, he pushed his phone away and grabbed his coffee.

"How come?" I wondered, unwilling to just let it drop. If it happened once or twice, that would be one thing; but this wasn't a new problem. For a couple of weeks, Booth had been struggling to get time with his son. If it wasn't Drew, it was plans for a playdate that "accidentally" mandated Parker to remain with Rebecca, or a school physical that happened to coincide with one of his alternating weekends. At first I had stayed out of it – it wasn't my business – but not only was it affecting Booth more and more, even Parker was going to notice sooner or later. "She isn't just _now_ seeing the guy – having her son around him twenty-four seven wouldn't make sense if she didn't know him." I knew a lot of parents tried to keep their dates away from their kids until they thought it was going somewhere. Rebecca was a fairly private person, so I guessed she would employ that same method to her personal life. If it wasn't a sudden, hard whack with the love bug, then what could possibly necessitate spending so much time with him at once without regard for her co-parent?

"It's not twenty-four seven," Booth sighed, defending his ex on the principle. "It's just-"

"Just enough to take time out of your custody agreement, right?" I interrupted, leaning over the table to look at him around Brennan. The anthropologist looked between us, trying to figure out where we both stood and what we were thinking before putting herself into the conversation. Booth stared at me for a few seconds, then looked away, but didn't say I was wrong. "Again," I urged, "It doesn't make sense. There's got to be something else…"

Once or twice was one thing. When it was recurring, it became a problem. It was unfair to keep Parker away from Booth this much, especially when he got a lot less time with their child than Rebecca did to begin with.

It couldn't just be the new boyfriend. Even if it was Rebecca being completely, high-school-grade obsessed with her new lover, she still wouldn't use him as an excuse to keep Parker in her household. Couples need alone time to bond. It's hard to get that alone time when you have a constant commitment to babysitting a kid young enough to need help getting anything to eat, and at an age where they will want to eat most of the time, at that.

So what else had changed? What about the situation between the parents had altered in the recent past that convinced Rebecca to keep Parker on a tighter leash? If it wasn't something in her life, it had to be something in Booth's or Parker's. Complicated life stressors aren't really running amok in Parker's life – puberty was still at least seven or eight years away – but as far as I knew, there wasn't anything new to Booth, either. His job was stressful but that was old news, and nothing particularly stood out in the recent history about him being hurt because of it. He didn't have any new house guests changing the environment, since his father was who-knows-where, his brother wasn't anywhere near Maryland, and his grandfather had been living out-of-state for decades.

All of these facts were always up for changing, of course, but I was reasonably confident that Booth would have told me if someone in his family had come to visit or moved nearby. He's so insistent that I spend time with Parker that he probably would want me to at least meet his other relatives, so-

 _Oh._

Wow, for someone smart enough to be hired by the Jeffersonian Institution, I sure was slow on the uptake sometimes – at least where family was concerned. I reached to the bridge of my nose and pinched, hard. Exactly how much am I going to have to deal with at once here?

"I'm sorry," Brennan told Booth consolingly, looking like the truly meant it.

"Ah… there's no need."

"It must be hard, not being able to see him when you want to."

She was stating the obvious, but rubbing it in wasn't what Brennan was trying to do. She was saying it out loud and trying to put herself in his shoes to empathize. Her tactic just had some holes in it and lacked some consideration, ironically defeating its purpose.

"See, this is information that I already _know,_ Bones." He assured her, his voice a little bit irritated. I took my hand away from my face and shook my head, holding my hair back behind my ears. "Why don't you-" He stopped himself before he said something else and decided to suggest, "Let's just say we discuss the case, hmm?"

"Sure," Brennan agreed willingly, her face skeptical. Both of us knew him a bit too well and knew exactly how this was going to go.

Sure enough, about five seconds after Brennan had agreed to just talk about work, Booth held his fist up in frustration and refrained from slamming his hand down onto the table. "You know, I'm his _father,"_ he stated intensely. I looked up at the ceiling. Sure, he needed to vent, but one of these times he was going to actually admit that he wanted to instead of agree on one thing and do the other. "Parker _knows_ that. I mean, that's – _that's_ what's important, not some stupid trip to the zoo."

The anthropologist could have made some comment about how exploration and learning with another adult forged bonds of trust and mentorship with children, but even she could tell that, on some level, Booth was seeking validation for his own assuagement. "No, absolutely," she confirmed.

"Right," he said, deflating slightly when she agreed.

"Yeah."

"Done!"

"Of course."

"Boom," he finished, swiping his hands across each other in a gesture. I wondered if he knew that that was the sign for "finished" or "complete" in ASL.

We sat there for another thirty seconds while I waited for one of them to say something, but both of them disappointed me, letting the quiet that followed their conclusion turn first tense, then awkward and uncomfortable. Neither of them seemed able to think of something to say afterwards.

"Well, that was eloquent," I snorted.

I broke the silence but then the timer just started again, neither of the adults taking the bait. I rolled my eyes. We were going to be sitting in the middle of the diner all day at this rate.

Finally, _finally,_ Brennan took the initiative to try to do help the situation. She leaned to the side of her chair, pushed her arm against the counter to stay balanced, and worked the sealed evidence bag out of her pocket. She sat upright again, turned it over so that the engraving was on the side facing upwards and then passed the golden jewelry to Booth. He took it quickly, glad for the distraction.

"We found this in her lung," Brennan informed. Thankfully no one else seemed to overhear.

 _"_ _What?"_ Booth looked up from the necklace and stared right at her in horror, hoping he'd heard wrong. "Her _lung?"_ Probably hoping he'd just heard wrong.

"It was enveloped during decomp," she explained, and Booth relaxed his shock marginally. It would have been pretty strange without the explanation – how the hell do you get an entire necklace in your lung?

He pushed the locket up with fingers underneath the pendant, pulling the plastic tight around it to see through without as much glare from the lighting. "Kenny?" He guessed, holding it at another angle so that his shadow made it easier to see.

"Any references to a Kenny in the case file?" She asked curiously.

"No," Booth shook his head. "But whoever Kenny is, he liked her enough to get her a locket." That didn't mean that much, did it? Well, I supposed that the locket would have to be appraised to tell how much it was actually worth. Either way, it was a nice gesture. "Maybe Kyle wasn't the only one who was cheating," he mused, looking at the back of the locket to see if there was anything on it, but the back side was blank.

Brennan pursed her lips but refrained from saying what she was clearly thinking about monogamy and infidelity. "Opens up a lot of possibilities," she said neutrally instead.

I snickered. "If we pick up our earlier discussion, ten dollars says Booth will not appreciate it," I challenged Brennan.

"What earlier discussion?" Booth asked, perking up suspiciously. I bit my lip and grinned shamelessly. Brennan looked unsurely at me, wanting to answer Booth but knowing that I was right about his reaction. Booth saw both of our responses and held out a hand to stop her before she decided. "No, wait, you're probably right, I don't want to know." Would that decision last very long? I hate the curiosity more than I hate the answers most of the time. "What do you say we just go talk to Carlie's friends and see if they know who Kenny is?"

I wanted to make a tasteless joke that maybe they all had lockets, too, but that would've been pushing Booth's mood a little too far. I really needed a hobby to get into so that I could channel my agitation into something more productive than making bad jokes and snidely speaking to my boss.

* * *

 **A/N: I'm curious how many readers will be able to guess what Holly realized in the diner. Sorry for the late update; things happened and I didn't have what it took to proofread yesterday. Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	8. Mother and Child in the Bay, Part Three

Carlie's friends had all played a part in the initial investigation. They had all given their statements of the last time they'd seen Carlie, and they had all similarly pointed their fingers at her husband to blame. None of it was as cut-and-dry as "I saw him do it," but the general agreement from everyone who knew Carlie was that Kyle had seemed like a nice guy, but had started acting like a real jerk, and they were all sure that the marriage would have crumbled if it weren't for the wife's disappearance.

"The four of us got so close, being in the same Lamaze class." One of them, a brown-skinned and black-haired woman named Faith, had been the first one we'd found, and then she'd recruited her friends. The ginger European woman, Tina Holmes, kept her toddler on her hip, but Faith and dark- and curly-haired Mary let their children keep playing in the soft plastic sandbox with toy cars. "Losing Carlie was like losing a sister."

"It was her idea to start this baby group," Tina offered.

The three women weren't actually a full-fledged organization, but they apparently had a group of friends, and the three of them ran a blog specifically for new mothers that helped them with tips and advice on taking care of their children, from the best food brands and safest toys, to the most affordable shops, to safe and family-friendly activities in the D.C. area that their kids might enjoy. As the blog got older, while the women's infants became little toddlers, the content expanded to include things like recommendations for how to teach their kids to talk and recognize symbols and words by sight. I checked it out on my phone. It was a good blog, and I fact-checked some of the supposed information, only to find an entire works-cited page from legitimate sources at the end of every article regarding health, safety, or education.

"We all felt so connected," Mary reminisced, holding her hands in front of her stomach as if she thought for a moment that she was still pregnant. "Feeling something growing inside, waiting to meet them…" My skin started to crawl at the description. Most people get offended when they hear it stated, but fetuses technically fit the dictionary definition of parasites until their birth. I can't imagine gracefully handling the changes being forced onto my body. "Do you have kids?"

I visibly cringed and wrapped my arms around myself in a hug.

Brennan looked at me in brief concern, as did the mothers, but Booth seemed a little exasperated, able to guess at the trigger. "He does," Brennan said, gesturing to Booth and distracting them from me.

"They make you feel whole," Mary sighed, looking over in her son's direction. Her little boy had denim overalls on over his tiny little red shirt, and he waved a toy dump truck over his lap. He spilled sand from the small cargo all over his legs. Personally, I was glad that Parker was at an age where I could be around him without constantly making sure he wasn't putting things in his mouth that really didn't need to be in his mouth – such as wires or sand or pens. I don't have the patience to handle an unplugged toaster, let alone a baby.

Brennan looked Mary over cynically. "It's just a release of serotonin necessary for the survival of the species." I'm sure she just meant to inform her of it – maybe she even thought Mary was confused and she was just clarifying, because she looked pretty puzzled by the woman's declaration herself.

Mary cocked her head and her polite smile wavered. "Huh?"

I gave her a fake smile and hoped it wasn't too obviously ingenuine. "Biology stuff."

"Never mind," Booth said, taking the attention away from Brennan and I as we fumbled over the whole "kids are great" ball that the mothers were pitching. He reached into his pants pocket and took out the evidence back with the locket Saroyan found in the lung. "Um, we found this necklace on Carlie's remains." He held it out and let Tina take it out of his hands. Mary looked over Tina's shoulder, and then the ginger handed it to Faith. "Did she ever mention a Kenny?"

Mary's smile, which had started to grow on her face as soon as she recognized the necklace, widened. She started nodding melancholically. "Yes…"

"She talked about Kenny all the time," Faith said with a wistful sigh, handing the necklace back to Brennan, who put the bag in her pocket to take it back to the evidence storage in the lab.

I made a little 'oh' with my mouth in surprise. Usually it took a lot more than one question to get anything out of an investigation, especially something in regards to potential infidelity. There was always the chance Kenny was a platonic friend, but it seemed unlikely, since there wasn't anyone with that name, or a similar one, in Carlie's history. "That was easier than I expected," I told Booth honestly.

"He was never mentioned in the police report," Booth asked searchingly.

Something dawned on Tina and she laughed. "Kenny was her dog," she explained, which definitely made the situation a little more sensible She probably wasn't having an affair with her dog. Probably.

"Oh," I said, a little disappointed. This meant that Saroyan was going to go right back to putting all the blame on Richardson with practically nothing but circumstantial evidence.

"Her dog?" Booth repeated, also sounding less than thrilled, but he had follow-up questions nonetheless.

"Kyle bought her the dog when things were better between them," Faith explained. That explained the sad tone to all of their reminiscent smiles. "She loved that dog. There used to be a picture of the two of them in there," she added. We still had to try to recover the photograph, but it seemed like it would be weird for the picture to have been swapped from something as innocent as a pet, so we could assume it probably wasn't anything majorly incriminating.

"What happened to the dog?" I wondered, curious why they all looked so sad.

"It died," Faith solemnly bowed her head for a second.

"Mary took care of it," Tina added, looking over at Mary.

The brunette looked back at the three of us and saw us all looking at her in interest. What did she mean, 'take care of it?' Arrange its assassination? Put together a puppy funeral? It could be interpreted in vastly different ways, some of which were very alarming. "I'm a vet," she told us. Brennan, Booth, and I all nodded quickly, understanding. "They brought it in a few months before Carlie disappeared. Kyle said he backed over it accidentally. Carlie always felt he did it on purpose." Well, that's a really rude thing to do. What did the dog ever do to him? "He was a real piece of work when he got mad."

* * *

"A dead dog," the pathologist said in relief while her back was turned, placing half-translucent white containers underneath a glass fume hood on a counter against the wall. "Excellent." I kept looking down at those containers. I couldn't see through them well enough to see for sure what was inside, but I had a reasonable guess that they were internal organs. They looked like they were in to-go cups.

"I dunno," I contradicted, just for the sake of being disagreeable and pushing my hands into my pockets, lazily leaning to the side. "I'm feeling pretty sad. I mean, what can a _dog_ do to deserve homicide?"

No one answered me, which bothered me. I wanted attention or I wouldn't have opened my mouth to be contrary.

"We're back to one suspect: Richardson."

I looked to my right at Booth, feeling more than a little betrayed. He was saying what Saroyan wanted to hear, but he wouldn't even acknowledge my sort-of joke? I took my eyes away from him quickly and glared angrily down at the autopsy table between the three of us and the newcomer.

"I like this," she said needlessly. We already knew exactly what she wanted – to arrest Richardson, whether or not he was actually guilty of homicide. _It's all about how it looks on paper, isn't it?_ "Good work."

 _I don't need your praise! If you're going to praise me then do it for something I actually did! I didn't talk to the friends to help you make Richardson look guilty!_ I could tell one thing for sure – if Saroyan had worked here when I'd first started consulting, I probably wouldn't have stuck around long enough to make friends or get my job. I'd have run away. Not that I'd have had the chance to bond with everyone – I'd have been too affronted at Saroyan's insistence of 'guilty until proven innocent' and her apparent disregard for any capabilities I might have for any subject other than being a bitch.

I wasn't so proud that I was going to wish to go back to the time right after I'd been almost murdered just to get rid of the annoying new boss, but it was a close call. What used to be the best part of my new lifestyle was now becoming the most stressful. This lab became a home, and now I feel like I'm not even welcomed.

Brennan took a deep breath, standing to my left and thankfully not noticing my rapid swing down from mildly irritated to downright resentful. "Do you want children?" She asked Saroyan, which elicited surprised reactions from she _and_ Booth, but not me. After the talk with the mothers at the park, it seemed like a reasonable follow-up to Brennan's thought process.

Saroyan had the last two containers in her gloved hands, in the process of moving them over to the counter, but she stopped, blinking at Brennan in poorly-handled shock. "What?" She asked a little edgily, as if the anthropologist had crossed some sort of social line by asking what seemed like a straightforward and non-offensive question.

"Children," Brennan answered persistently.

Saroyan looked at Booth again for his reaction. Booth just kind of shrugged, and I guess that meant that he was telling his old friend that Brennan wasn't asking anything untoward or being particularly unusual. She slowly put the containers down underneath the protruding fume cover and then turned back to us, her hands on her hips.

"Maybe," she said indecisively. "If I could find one that sleeps late and cleans." _So… a docile and responsible teenager._ I wanted to be bothered by her reply so I'd have another thing to fault her for, but it was hard to do when I sort of agreed with the sentiment. Children are a lot of work, and before you're bonded to one, they're just loud, time-sucking, needy, miniature humans. She didn't seem to me like a very maternal person – at least, not to the extent that it showed in the lab. She narrowed her eyes. "Does this apply to the case in any way?"

Brennan was already almost uninterested in Saroyan after she got her answer. She would probably ask Angela a similar question later. Seeing the popular opinions of the people around her had a great deal of input in how she responded to and quantified the values of other people, almost as much as the numbers, statistics, and research studies that regarded the topics.

"No, just… curious." Brennan shrugged this time, showing that there wasn't an ulterior motive. Then, because the former New Yorker wasn't being very receptive to her curiosities or her quirks, she looked to the much more patient F.B.I. agent and explained it to him, instead. "Most people think it's odd when a woman doesn't want children."

"Yeah, they looked at me pretty strangely," I agreed. Sometimes I thought I didn't have a single maternal bone in my body. I used to think it was because I hadn't ever been taught what maternal care even _was,_ not even been given nice dolls to play with, but in the last year especially I was thinking it was less of a lack of nurturing abilities and more of a stunning disuse of them. Who would I want to nurture, anyway? The spoilt brat that pulled my hair and bit me and generally abused me any way she could because her parents would always take her side, no matter what?

"But, obviously, you don't think it's unusual for females not to want offspring." After nodding first to me, someone finally crediting me with my thoughts and speech, she then looked to Saroyan, mentally adding her to the list of women she knew who had little to no interest in childrearing.

Saroyan looked at Brennan strangely, clearly ruffled and unsure how to proceed in the awkward silence that followed.

"Are you pregnant?" She asked finally, without further preamble.

Brennan looked alarmed. "No. I'm not, no."

Saroyan looked at her, nodded a little, and then turned her head to stare at Booth for a double affirmative. The agent's expression went from amused to uncomfortable. "Why are you looking at me?" He demanded, taking a step away from the situation.

Taking the awkward response from Booth as some sort of confirmation that Brennan indeed had not conceived a fetus (and this was getting weird, even by my standards), Saroyan rolled her eyes. "Well, as long as you aren't leaving the lab every two minutes to pee," she asserted sarcastically, her firm voice very clearly belying the _I don't care_ that she left unsaid.

"No intention of it," Brennan promised, shaking her head.

Next the raptor-like focus was turned onto me. I bristled. What did the pathologist want from me now? For me to promise I wasn't pregnant? To swear never to have children? To make a vow of celibacy? The way she was looking at me said she wanted verbal assertion that she wouldn't have to deal with me trying to be a parent on top of everything else I was doing that was ticking her off.

 _Well, if I were to choose to have a child, then that would be my decision_. I wasn't going to make any promises to her about my personal life, because I didn't owe her anything, and she had no claim to my private decisions. I cocked my head at her a little confrontationally and pointedly kept my mouth shut, saying more without speaking than I could have if I'd screamed.

"So all of this back-and-forth was for nothing?" After a few seconds of me making my stance clear, Saroyan let the matter rest and fixed her eyes on Brennan again, who pursed her lips but was reluctant to share any further information of her feelings or confusion on the topic with someone who she clearly didn't like. "Good to know," the pathologist said flatly, taking the lack of answer as a clarification. "Now, unless the liver has a written confession it by a pet parakeet, we should have enough to build a solid forensic case against Richardson for the prosecutor."

Anger bubbled up, hot and overflowing, all over again. "You know, unless _Richardson didn't do it,"_ I scathingly retorted. I hoped Richardson hadn't done it now, for no particular reason other than spiting my "boss."

Footsteps preceded Hodgins' entry, but he took one look around the autopsy lab and shrank back towards the doorway again, about ready to turn tail and run from what he'd just interrupted. It would have been funny if I wasn't pushing my nails into my hands, trying to make myself bleed if that was what it took to have a distraction, to stop feeling so _mad_ and _mean_ all the time.

"I… found something that might put a new wrinkle in things," Hodgins said apologetically, wincing when Saroyan's face fell, and moving into the lab just to get out of the way when Booth threw his arms up and then let them fall down to his sides, turning on his heel to leave.

"Great," Booth declared insincerely, bitter and conflicted. I should have felt bad. I should have felt compassionate. I just didn't have enough room left in my own emotional capacity to feel a lot for anyone else's, and it was because I just couldn't handle Saroyan's effect on me or my environment. It was going to drive me insane.

* * *

That fish that Hodgins was way too happy to receive was brought back into the autopsy lab for a second appearance, dissected, inspected, and prized like a Nobel piece, going by the way that he carried it importantly over to the table and set it next to a computer.

"The fish was a pomatomus saltatrix, a blue fish common to the Delaware Bay, and there were dinoflagellates consistent with the saltwater in the bay." Hodgins turned around after putting the fish under the magnification specs and standing at the front of the room, excited for the attention that came before his grand reveal.

Booth quite literally yawned.

Looking over at Booth, Saroyan chuckled and turned her eyes over to the deflating entomologist, who looked wounded that the agent was so bored that he was struggling to stay awake. I snickered. "Dozing off, Hodgepodge," Saroyan told him entirely too truthfully.

Hodgins' shoulders sagged and he gave up on his idea of having the spotlight. I almost felt bad for him, but sometimes his disappointment was just too funny to watch. Grudgingly, he got on with it without making such a show. "But I also found didinium, a ciliate, and oomycota, a mold – both of which are found in freshwater."

"So the body was in both fresh and saltwater," I summarized.

"Exactly." A ghost of a smile was on Hodgins' face and he went back to showing off a little. "Freshwater first, for at least six months." He looked over at Booth inconspicuously again and cheered up a little now that the F.B.I. agent was actually paying attention and looked a little more wakeful.

"And Richardson was definitely placed at the marina the night she went missing." I reminded Saroyan, taking every ounce of my self-control not to gloat. Oh, who was I kidding – I was still gloating a little bit, but at least I was trying. Saroyan, chagrined, looked at the magnified image of the fish carcass. "Since the marina is surrounded by saltwater, maybe he didn't do it."

I really only meant to agitate Saroyan. It wasn't fair of her to keep blaming Richardson without evidence, and what I wanted to do was point out that blindly accusing someone of murder was rude, and that just because things looked a certain way didn't mean that you could assume they were as they seemed without anything solid to back it up. Instead, Saroyan wasn't the only one who looked down, sighed, and slowly walked out of the lab. A pair of men's dress shoes padded out of the room after the clicks of the high heels.

 _Well, that didn't go according to plan._

I was adult enough to realize that in the process of trying to gloat, I had kind of screwed up. Maybe Saroyan had the point coming, but I had forgotten that Booth had been on the case the first time. His main suspect had been Richardson. If Richardson wasn't the killer, then that meant that Booth hadn't even been on the right track the first time.

Realizing I'd opened my big mouth without thinking and hurt someone I cared about for it, I looked across the room to Hodgins, expecting him to look disappointed in me, or at the very least, irritated that I wasn't more sensitive. Instead the entomologist just shrugged at me sympathetically, understanding that it hadn't been my intention. I pulled out a chair and threw myself down next to the cleaned autopsy table, just glaring at the tray with the dead fish.

* * *

It wasn't just my imagination that as we were walking across a catwalk in the upper levels of the lab, Saroyan was walking faster, her gait almost irate. Brennan and I kept in pace next to each other, but the coroner was rushing ahead, her body language saying that she was less than pleased.

"What the hell's going on here?" She voiced, her voice trailing back behind her for Brennan and I to hear. We exchanged a look before both of us paid more attention to the superior that we reluctantly had to acknowledge. "Richardson is the only logical suspect. Are we working for the defense now?"

I rolled my shoulders and shook my head. I couldn't believe we were going to get into this again. I didn't care who the likely suspect was supposed to be; if the evidence fit Richardson, fine, but what happened to the chain of evidence to suspect to determination of guilt? This seems like it's going the other way around, which I can't stand. If this was how they solved their crimes in New York, I was glad that DC worked differently.

"Um, _I'm_ working for the dead girl," I enunciated meaningfully, perfectly aware that I was implying that Saroyan herself was not.

"As am I," Brennan agreed vehemently without pausing. She was always the one who disliked conjecture. "And we have to be open to the evidence as it presents itself."

I got the feeling that Saroyan was rolling her eyes. I'd go so far as to bet on it. When she replied, she sounded like she was reciting something she'd already said a thousand times to a couple of stubborn morons who weren't listening. "The knife, the rope, and the plastic sheeting are all from Richardson's house, that's been confirmed." She raised her dominant right hand over her shoulder and snapped her fingers. "We're trying to build a case here, people."

I huffed. Her obsession with making a case over solving a crime was ridiculous. This lab wasn't suited for working up to compiling an approach for the courts.

That in mind, I stopped exactly where I was walking. My body wanted to keep moving forward, but I leaned to keep my balance. "I don't know what you're trying to do, but I'm trying to find out who killed Carlie and her baby," I declared, raising my voice and standing still. Saroyan's footsteps stopped less abruptly, and then the other black-haired woman turned around to look at me. Brennan hovered, watching back and forth to measure the reactions and the level of conflict.

"I really don't care if it was Richardson or her parents or a complete stranger," I flatly announced. It was really hard to care about the actual proof while remaining invested in politics or suspicions, which was why I prioritized one unfailingly over the other. "What matters is that the murderer pays for it, not that Richardson is convicted because he looks guilty." I kept my head raised while I looked at her, and she listened to me with a hint of annoyance, but the way she stood and didn't interrupt made me think she was trying to be indulgent. "There's always an alternative explanation. Maybe someone broke into his house and stole the things used," I suggested, making a list to prove that I was right. "Or maybe they were let inside because they were friends. Or, additionally, maybe it's just a coincidence that the rope and plastic are the same products that Richardson buys."

I shrugged. It really was impossible to know just by guesswork. It was like trying to put together a project without any adhesives; it might come together, but it was shaky and delicate. Too fragile to rely on. "Another scenario is that someone bought the same stuff on purpose to frame him. That's five options. If you really do play poker on your off days, you should know that the odds are too high to bet more than you've got."

I prided myself on making the smart comparison to poker, thinking it was a brush of genius, and applauded myself mentally.

Saroyan seemed to be giving me a minute to make sure that I was actually done speaking. I didn't care as much, because the little smile that Brennan was rewarding me with felt like approval for my own decision to reinforce the views that we both stood for, and then she turned to our boss and put in her own opinion.

"We aren't cops," she firmly stated, probably thinking that Saroyan needed a reminder to get herself out of that mindset. "We're scientists. We don't work to build cases on the behalf of the court. We build them for the people who have found themselves in our care because someone else committed a heinous crime against them." Her fervency in the response reminded me of the emotional way she'd taken the accidental murder of the illegal Salvadoran immigrant. Maybe if the pathologist had seen that, she'd be more inclined to understand our perspective. " _They_ are who I care about."

Saroyan tapped the neatly round-filed points of her painted fingernails on the slightly bunched fabric over her upper arm. Her eyes roamed from Brennan and I, unsure which of us to address to stifle down this strike of disagreement.

"Look, guys, I just want you to fill in the blanks." She conceded. Maybe it wasn't a concession to her, but given that that wasn't exactly what she'd been saying before, that had to be what it was taken as. "There must be freshwater close enough for Richardson to have dumped the body."

 _Ack! Again with the insistence on Richardson!_ If I were Kyle Richardson, I'd be running away _because_ of people like Saroyan, who wouldn't bother listening and would instead move for conviction before anyone could finish processing all of the evidence.

"Even if there _is_ , it's still not a viable potential explanation unless Hodgins matches the levels of chemical balance, pH, sedimentary composition, entomological activity, et cetera," I said, raising my chin rebelliously. We could've moved on, if it weren't for that damned last sentence of hers.

Brennan extended a hand halfway towards me in a gesture of acknowledgment. "And if we find a body of water that matches," she said, also using the word 'if' to illustrate once more that it was a very hypothetical situation. "It has to be dredged for additional body parts. We're still missing the left patella, tibia, and calcaneus." I nodded. That sounded like an accurate list. We couldn't prove that was where the body had been without the rest of the bones – it's not like they'd just gone _poof_ and ceased to exist. "And the fetus-"

Saroyan held up a hand. It was like being told to talk to the offered limb back in elementary school, which had only made me want to introduce said hands to my fist. Forcefully. It was such a rude and dismissive gesture when it came from someone with whom you held hostility. "Okay. Fine." Wearily, she acted like we were being difficult for no reason. "Just stop talking and do it."

When Saroyan dropped her hand and slid her other's fingers from her sleeve, turning back around and heading in the other direction without us, I was feeling stingy and offended for being written off. It's not like I was bitching about nothing. Didn't we owe it to the victims to be thorough? Wasn't it our responsibility to be accurate?

"I really don't like that she's trying so hard to pin it all on one person!" I vented to Brennan suddenly, letting my angry voice out at a normal speaking volume as her back got too far away for her to hear. She reached the stairs and didn't look back up at us, even when Brennan looked at me, a scowl still on her face. "You know, if all of the cops have that same perspective, then I can't blame Richardson for running!"

"Neither can I," Brennan agreed with me, looking after Cam and putting her hands in front of her like she was unsure what to do with her limbs. Shortly after, she slid them into her pockets. I stared after the pathologist, trying to silently talk myself out of expending the energy required to work up an actual, proper anger. "We're supposed to be on the side of the law enforcement. If they don't care about being truthful and accurate, then why are we helping them?"

She looked at me, but it was such a question of rhetoric and principle that I didn't realize it wasn't an actual question seeking an actual answer until she kept watching, expecting for me to say something back to her.

"Good question," I said, looking away from Saroyan. It was definitely too much work to be properly motivated to fume before I'd even had an actual meal. I dunno how many calories anger burns, but given that my anger tends to manifest itself as aggressive walking and sometimes jogging, probably a few more than happiness burns. "And unfortunately not one that I have an answer for."

* * *

My head broke the surface of the lake water and I pushed my hair back up over my head, using the water to slick my hair out of the way. An oxygen tank was on my back and a mask was sealed over my face. Hodgins, Brennan, and I had all taken on the adventurous task of donning wetsuits and swimming around in the lake trying to find evidence. Hodgins collected water samples primarily, but he was also keeping an eye out for any bones or knives or other potential case-related objects that had sunk to the bottom of the lake. I had to swim over closer to the shore to stand up on the lakebed, flippers on my feet sinking into the heavy sand, and the water came up to my stomach.

"I won't know until I compare it to the samples in the lab." Hodgins was saying to Booth, already having surfaced and removed his mask, holding up a few vials and displaying one in particular with an orange band around it.

Booth stood at the water's edge, keeping his shoes and cuffs of his trousers from getting wet. "Then why'd you get so excited?" He complained.

Smirking, Hodgins replied, "I guess I just like gamophyta." He was closer to the shore, water only sloshing up past his knees.

I took the mask off of my face and peeled the seal away from my face, taking in a breath of fresh air. It felt different than the oxygen from the tank – somehow more normal, part of the atmosphere, because it wasn't as pure as the air that smelled like woods and water.

I held a white golf ball in my hand, retrieved from the lake floor a few meters deeper.

"You know," Booth sighed, pointing at Hodgins exasperatedly. I didn't know how long they'd been talking, but at least Hodgins was pretty safe. I doubted Booth would fire into the water where Brennan and I also were. "You really _don't_ have to act any geekier. The whole outfit does it for you."

"Geek chic, dude," Hodgins defended, nodding over to an F.B.I. agent talking with her partner. I didn't recognize her or know her name, having not been introduced, but she shyly waved back at Hodgins when she saw him looking at her. "Agent Blondie over there thinks I'm hot." I could probably agree with her, if Hodgins wasn't almost fifteen years older than me.

"He's knee-deep in a lake and being told to search for samples," I called across the water, voice bouncing off the small sloshing waves. "This is like throwing a kid in a ball pit with instructions to search for just the green ones. You should join us in here! This is freaking awesome!" I couldn't remember the last time I'd had such a good time at work. It would've been before McVicar. Maybe it was when we'd thrown the pig through the wood chipper? I loved working here most of the time, and I was dedicated to Brennan and Zach's tutelage in anthropology… but some of the most fun work came while Hodgins was teaching me, because it led to lab experiments and scuba diving in lakes.

I liked working in the Jeffersonian when I wasn't allowed to be anywhere except where Brennan and/or Booth was. It had been entertaining. The squints had figured they should be nice to me and had taught me some of their trade, answering questions and explaining things. Hodgins in particular was impressed by my knowledge of his field of study without any formal education, and although I spent a lot of time in the field, he still actively took me under his wing like a student assistant. So even if he was fifteen years younger, I don't think I'd really be attracted to him beyond an aesthetic sense.

Booth chose to pretend that I hadn't just suggested he suit up and come swimming in dirty lake water. It was dirty, but the wetsuit covered all parts of me except my hands and head, and I could always wash my hair. "Anything?" He asked hopefully.

I held up the white golf ball and then chucked it to shore. He caught it reflexively and then dropped it, wiping the water off on his pants. "There are a lot of golf balls and coins. Are we even anywhere near a course?" I asked, amazed that there could be so many.

Booth shrugged helplessly, not knowing of a golf course nearby and not having a suitable answer for the abundance of golf apparatus.

"You know, I went out with a woman who had a little kid once," Hodgins said thoughtfully. I snickered. I could imagine Hodgins liking kids. He was a really nice guy and usually very patient, too.

"Aren't you supposed to be looking for slime?"

Hodgins ignored Booth's terribly obvious attempt at getting out of a personal talk. Maybe he was doing it just to spite him. Though he'd (mostly) grown out of his distrust of Booth since we'd met, he still liked to see how many buttons he could press before he was threatened with bodily harm. "The kid hated me! You know, he said I used too many big words."

As much as I thought Hodgins would be good with kids, I could also understand that. Hodgins forgot to use laymen's terms sometimes, or he intentionally used the scientific jargon for the sake of precision. His attitude may be good for toddlers, but his vocabulary was more suited for teenagers and adults.

"Well, he got that right," Booth scoffed, scuffing the rocks near the shore with his shoe and sending a few splashing in.

"He hit me in the head with a Tonka truck!" Hodgins whined loudly, glaring at Booth for taking the kid's side. I laughed. "Ah, I could never sleep with his mom again…"

"Well, you know, at least the story ends well," Booth joked.

"Oh!"

"I was good to him, you know." The entomologist sniffed, bending over to collect another sample of the water from where he was standing. "I did _not_ deserve an eighteen-wheeler into the parietal bone." My first thought was a violent eighteen-wheeler with a corresponding remote control and a clever kid being its controller. I laughed harder, covering my mouth. Picking the vial up and holding it over his head, he looked at it through the sunlight and lit up. "Ooh! Nematodes and planaria!"

Booth tiredly shook his head. "Does that mean anything?"

Hodgins just kind of shrugged. "Not sure." He was just happy anyway. It was the gamophyta all over again.

Booth frowned at me. "What's your problem?"

"I'm having a hilarious mental image of Hodgins being abused with vehicles by a child," I snickered, making Hodgins pout at me in betrayal. "This is totally worth the drive out." I reached my mask and started to secure it to my face again to wade out deeper and take another dive.

Before I could dislodge the swimming flippers from the jelly-like soaked sand, Brennan broke the water a few yards away, holding a plastic container and keeping a thin white top over it to keep what she'd found inside. Her mask dripped with water, her tied hair looked stringy and black. She unsealed the watertight mask and pulled it off of her face, letting it hang by her neck.

"Anything?" He asked her, almost begging for someone to have been productive.

Brennan took the top off of the container and moved it to the bottom, then picked up something small and turned it over. "Bones," she reported. "Could be from the fetus. Hamate, triquetral, portions of the phalanges." Grey-blue water in the container made the contents murky and hard to see, but apparently she had a lot. She must've found the actual bones while Hodgins and I had just been searching the wrong place. "And another Top-Flite," she added, taking out a golf ball and throwing it to Booth, who plucked it out of the air, then cringed that he'd done it again.

"See? I told you there were a lot!" Seriously, we weren't even near a golf course!

* * *

I hummed while I looked at the bones on the table. They covered only a small portion, and it wasn't exactly the normal anatomical order. With latex gloves covering up my hands, I hesitated for just a moment before I tentatively put my finger on top of one of the phalanx bones. Briefly, I had a memory of the FBI medical examiner who had mistreated a phalanx and ended up the recipient of Brennan's ire. I picked it up slowly like I was going to try to replace it somewhere else – like it was just a piece of a jigsaw puzzle – then stopped and put it right back where it had been, staring at the bones meanly.

I did not appreciate being outsmarted by the remains of a dead person. How smart could they even be? Not only was it a baby, but it was a _dead_ baby.

While I was thinking very rude thoughts in the direction of the skeleton, Zach led Brennan back in. We were more than reasonably sure that we had done it right, but we wanted our boss to come take a look just in case. Maybe she would solve the problem for us. Or at least show us what we were doing wrong and then let us try to refigure it to fit the new information.

She was pulling on her gloves as Zach brought her inside. He hadn't taken his off. He and Brennan both entered the room and went to the right of the table, standing on the side opposite me. "According to the reconstruction with these new bones, the fetus has seven fingers." Zach pointed out the twenty-one phalanges that comprised the seven fingers. One was roughly snapped at the very end.

Brennan made another confused face when she looked more specifically at the layout. All of the phalanges were laid out anatomically on the right side of the body – seven fingers for what should have been one hand. "And two right hands?" She reached over to pick one of them up and held it in her palm to be safe.

"That doesn't seem right," I declared obviously, pointing down at the offensive bones.

"I don't understand. Was there another victim?" Zach looked to our teacher for the answers.

Brennan didn't answer at first, gently placing the small bone down underneath a magnifying lens on the tray with the microscope and magnifier. "Double the magnification…" She twisted the knob very slowly, making the smallest adjustments to the microscope as she leaned over to look into the sights. "Okay." Her shoulders fell and she stepped back, taking her hand off of the dial slowly so as to not move it from its position. "Look at the structure of the phalanges."

Zach was closer. I motioned for him to go ahead. The student set a hand on the side of the table despite that its wheels were locked and peered down the binocular-like scope. _"Ah,"_ he said with dawning realization, able to see something new on the stronger magnification. "The bones from the lake are from a raccoon."

I glared hatefully at the raccoon bones. It was a lot easier to do so without feeling guilty now that I knew they weren't belonging to a murdered infant.

"Mm-hmm." Brennan crossed her arms. Zach moved away from the microscope, so I went to go check it out. I liked learning and I was curious what the difference was in zoom that we hadn't been able to see with our own eyes. "The formation of the hands is almost identical to an infant's hand."

Zach walked away while I looked, giving me the personal space I needed to feel safer. The raccoon bones, when seen up close, were still similar to a baby's. It was Brennan's and Zach's training that let them tell the difference quickly. I just tried to memorize the slightly different shape and made myself a mental note that that wasn't a feature that varied in age, but in species.

"How did you do?" Hodgins' voice asked from behind me. I assumed he'd come into the bone room while I'd been distracted by the microscope.

Standing up, I rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrist and then pushed my hands underneath the edges of both gloves. "We found a drowned rodent," I announced with annoyance, stripping both latex layers off of my hands at the same time. In the open air with more circulation, my hands felt sticky, sweaty, and dry at the same time. "How about you?" I tossed the gloves down into the trash can and put my hands on my hips, turning to look at Hodgins while I asked.

Hodgins looked unhappily down at a tray light enough to hold with one hand. When he held it up a little higher, emphasizing the sample jars on it, I realized that they weren't just lightweight, but they were also turning out to be of little significance.

"Sediment and organic material from the lake doesn't match what was taken from the remains," he said, looking as ticked off with his particulates as I felt with my – well, the raccoon's – bones. The sounds of heels announced either Angela's or Saroyan's approach from the hallway. Hodgins glanced out the corner of his eye, deemed them a cool audience, and kept going. "I have to look for another body of freshwater, but I don't think it's around here," he warned.

Saroyan caught the tail end of Hodgins' report and looked into the room, seeing the four of us all conferring without her and making the assumption that we were being particularly productive. "What have you got?" She prompted for a report.

Brennan just shook her head, for once able to disappoint Saroyan without needing to be mouthy or disobedient. "Nothing."

Hodgins turned to face her, holding the tray haphazardly at a tilt. The little sample jars slid towards the edge, but the rim was too raised for them to just tip over and fall off of. "The next body of freshwater that _might_ match is over sixty miles away."

"Richardson couldn't have been there, it wouldn't match the timeline." Brennan told Saroyan, taking off her gloves and dropping them unexcitingly into the waste bin after mine. Both of us stood in front of Zach with our arms crossed, awaiting some sort of response from the pathologist.

What Saroyan heard was not what she had wanted to hear. Taking a deep breath, she exhaled and looked down at the floor, shutting her eyes. "I've got the board of the Jeffersonian, the federal prosecutor, and Nancy Grace ready to devour me if I don't hand them enough to indict Richardson," she shared.

Normally I'd have been sympathetic. I knew what it was like to be pressured by other people, albeit in different situations. It was just that not only was Saroyan under pressure from other people, but she was pressuring us to get evidence against Richardson, blaming him before there was any evidence, and she'd jumped the gun on pointing fingers to the crime. She'd been right on board with those other people, whoever they were (I probably didn't know any of them), up until it started looking like it would be harder to prove, and honestly I didn't know if she was slowly starting to change her mind because it was easy or because of the evidence.

"Well, if you want us to manufacture evidence-" Brennan started to smartly say, her temper making a guest appearance with a tonal implication behind her started sentence.

Saroyan held up a hand to cut her off. "No, I want us to find out who killed Carlie and I'm pissed 'cause whoever did it is messing with me, and I don't like that." A ghost of a smile flickered over my face. _That's_ what I'd been wanting to hear – that she wanted to know who killed the mother and baby. It was gone before it was even really there. "I like doing the messing," she added aggressively.

I nodded. No matter how upset I was with her or how little we had in common, anyone around knew that both of us were in the same boat – we were confrontational and hated being manipulated. "No objections here."

"Then we have to determine whether we're wasting our time on Richardson." Pointedly, Brennan looked right at Saroyan.

Saroyan breathed in deeply, looked around at all of our expectant faces. I hoped she saw that that was a deciding moment in how we would operate with her as part of the team. She couldn't expect us to respect her if she didn't respect us, and her methods had obviously not gotten us anywhere, so we deserved a turn to utilize the tried-and-true techniques we'd been using long before we had ever heard her name.

She came to a decision and nodded sharply. "Tell me what you need," she instructed the anthropologist.

* * *

"Okay, but then who _did_ kill her?"

"If I knew that, do you really think we'd still be in your office?"

Booth sighed and pinched his nose, seated in his desk chair. I uncrossed my legs and stretched both out, then crossed my feet at the ankles. He couldn't really expect me to do everything all at once, could he? I was doing pretty well as it was, but it was a challenge. At least Saroyan had finally relented, relaxing her iron fist somewhat for a little more room to actually operate.

Not that Booth was having a complete ball, either. The search for Richardson was still coming back fruitless, and I wanted some words with the guy. Killer or not, he still punched his girlfriend in the face. For as long as he was on the run, it was hard to completely exonerate him. He looked really bad when he took to the hills. While I believed the bureau would find him sooner or later, as long as the evidence supported that he wasn't the killer, he wasn't my first priority. I was secretly betting that the feds would actually catch him sooner – they had already caught up to a ditched car with Richardson's license plates, so they were getting warmer.

"Great." Booth dropped a pen so it clacked on his desk and sarcastically smiled at me. "So we're down to zero suspects and we don't know where she was killed. Doesn't most of your squinty, super-special-science-sorcery come from the crime scenes?"

I scowled at him. There was no call for being rude because he was frustrated. Ignoring how hypocritical that was, I held up my hands and made finger quotations. "Our "squinty, super-special-science-sorcery" comes from _evidence_ ," I enunciated clearly like he was dumb. Yep, some definite hypocrisy going on. "Which we still have, by the way. And in case you forgot, we are _not_ supposed to be in the practice of assigning blame without probable cause. We still have everyone else that was involved with Carlie or Kyle at the time of the murder. The girlfriend, the friends, maybe some people we don't even know about yet. We don't have _zero_ suspects, we just don't have any that you're dead-set on arresting."

The agent narrowed his eyes. "I'm not _dead-set_ on anything," he objected. "I just want to catch the son of a bitch that murdered Carlie Richardson and her son. And, you know, if he didn't do anything wrong, why did he run?"

"Because the FBI all but ruined his life last time around!" I heatedly retorted. "Everyone thought he was the murderer, he lost his job because of the allegations, his in-laws refused to talk to him and his own family shut him out completely. Things had finally started to calm down, and now it starts again? I probably would've run, too!"

The door to the office opened without any polite knocks, and Booth and I simultaneously glared. I had to twist around in my seat to glower intimidatingly at the man at the door, an older white male with narrow-lensed glasses and wispy, greying hair, standing easily over six feet tall and leading a woman his age, almost a foot shorter, in a pink blouse with short blonde hair right behind him.

"Excuse me, Agent Booth…" the man started to say, not really paying any heed to my warning expression. The woman caught it, though, and she looked at me curiously with some skepticism. "I don't know if you remember us… um, I'm Dennis Campbell. This is my wife Patricia. We're Carlie's parents."

I stopped glaring immediately and felt a little bad, but in my defense, they still should have knocked. I was trying to have an argument in here, and I would never confess that I was glad it was interrupted before it got worse, so of course I had to at least act appropriately offended.

Booth stood up quickly, losing the snappish attitude in favor of grace and compassion. He rose from his seat. "Yes, I know." I bit my tongue and stood up myself, walking to the side of the desk behind the desktop monitor, freeing up the chair. Booth had his own, and then two more, and I was alright with standing. I'd prefer it, in fact, if there were going to be other people behind me. I put my back to the corner and leaned my hip on the desk's edge while the adults stepped inside. "Please, sit down." Booth indicated the two chairs. Holding her small, leather bag in her hands tightly, Patricia sat down first and her husband followed suit.

I looked at them both and waved lamely at the victim's mother.

Booth glanced at me. "I'm so sorry for your loss," he lead with the always-safe bet, and held a hand out to me over the top of the computer, making sure he didn't get close enough to actually touch my shoulder. "This is my partner, Holly Kirkland. She wasn't with me last year, but she is now."

"Hi." I still wondered why he introduced me as that. Maybe it made sense when the bureau was my in and I was his ward, but after that I had been a Jeffersonian consultant. He had only introduced me as his daughter a handful of times and to very specific people, and eventually he got what I didn't say and noticed that I was more uncomfortable when he did it, so now he just introduced me as one of his partners. "Condolences."

I didn't know what else I was supposed to say and hoped that about covered it. Plus, I didn't have the history of acquaintance that Booth did from the first time he worked their daughter's case.

Patricia seemed less unsettled by me since I was working with Booth. I should probably have learned at some point that being more sociable would benefit me, but it's hard to change a personality overnight and honestly, I may not like myself very much all the time, but I'm pretty proud of who I am, especially more recently. I've been through a ton of suffering no one should have to, much less a kid, and yet I'm still pretty morally straight. For the most part. Ish.

"Well, at least now our daughter can rest with her baby," the mother's voice caught and her eyes welled up. She touched the corners of her eyes to rub away the tears before they fell and stabilized her voice. "And Kyle can never touch them again."

Now, while I hated the insistence of everyone that Kyle Richardson was the bad guy, it was really hard to get pissed at the parents for making that assumption. They weren't privy to the investigation, so of course they blamed the most suspicious suspect. Their daughter and grandchild was dead. As far as I was concerned, they could blame Richardson all they wanted, as long as they accepted that they were wrong if someone else was the culprit.

Dennis looked at me and back at Booth. I looked over at him and noticed that our arms were crossed in the same way. I looked away and my first impulse was to uncross mine, but I was not going to give in to that before he did.

"The reason we're here-" Dennis started to say, but his wife interrupted.

With a sigh and a surreptitious wipe of her eyes, she opened up her handbag and took out a carefully laminated piece of cardstock. The back was facing us, and all I could tell was that it was photo printer paper. "We were going through some photos for the funeral and we came across this one."

I held my hand out, closer to her than Booth was, and she passed it over without hesitation or Booth's assent. It was nice to be treated like I belonged, a feeling I wasn't sure would ever stop being surreal when it came to the FBI.

The photograph looked dusty like it had been stored somewhere dark and undisturbed, but it still had the glossy shine. They were at some sort of indoor function, maybe a restaurant or a hall, with tables laid out with entrees and half-picked at plates of cuisines and appetizers. At least half of the people in the photo were too blurry to really tell more than their race, sex, and a general idea of their age, but Kyle, Carlie, Karen, and some other man I didn't know were all clearest in focus. Everyone's glasses had a purple, burgundy-colored drink except for Carlie's, and the swell of her stomach was explanation enough why she was the beverage outlier. Kyle was posing for the camera, Carlie's shot was more candid, and Karen, in the background next to her seat neighbor, was glaring in Kyle's direction.

I handed it to Booth over the top of the monitor and he took it from the opposite edge, turning it over to see it right-side up for himself. While the actual agent studied it, the Campbells seemed disappointed by the lack of a reaction from me. It just seemed like a normal outing.

"Kyle used to go out of town on business," Dennis elaborated, lifting a hand halfway up to point at the photo Booth held. "His firm had an office in Boston. Carlie went with him once."

"That's them with some people in Boston. That woman on the news, Karen Tyler, she said she met Kyle after Carlie disappeared. But – but there she is, looking at him." Sickened by the lying, Patricia shook her head and her voice, although the latter wasn't intentional. Her face was getting a little redder.

She wasn't the only one. Dennis looked revolted. "He admitted to being involved with those other girls," he reminded us from the first investigation. "Why did he lie about knowing her?"

A lot of things had come to light that made the Richardsons' marriage look like it was circling the drain, only enforcing the belief that the husband was the killer. A particularly strong theory was that, since Richardson was unemployed, he had killed Carlie to collect on her life insurance, and those that thought that was true turned up their nose at him and acted all high and mighty because the company hadn't paid without proof of death. What they didn't stop and consider was that Richardson had had a steady employment as an assistant manager of the store he worked at until the accusations started flying. They got the order of events wrong.

Still, there was always some that could have been hidden or misrepresented. Lying didn't look good for Kyle. It also wasn't looking too good for Karen – who was to say she hadn't removed Carlie so that she could take the brunette's place?

"Was this the only picture you saw her in?" I asked both parents, looking between them to show I really didn't address either of them in particular. I would take answers however they came.

"Ah, yes." Patricia nodded apologetically, knowing it wasn't much to go on, and pinched the top of her bag shut. "We didn't look at all of them, but we have a few from when she was with Kyle… she was never as close to us as she used to be."

 _Well, she was probably upset,_ I rationalized. She'd been under a lot of stress. Pregnancy did that to people, and her suffering marriage was probably another sore point. Her parents may have been more supportive of Kyle before she went missing, but if they hadn't been, then she may not have wanted to talk to them about what was troubling her, and just stopped communicating as much because that was easier than holding her tongue.

"I'm really sorry, ma'am," I said to her empathetically instead of explaining how depression works, and how their opinions of her life choices may have influenced how much she felt comfortable sharing with them.

Booth held up the image, some new determination sparked by the lead. "May I keep this photo?" He asked permission.

"Of course," Patricia confirmed, nodding quickly, voice catching again. She lowered her head and covered her eyes.

Dennis wrapped his arm around his wife's shoulders and pulled her in. She was so much shorter that her side fit under his arm and she shuffled towards his front to let him hug her. He held strong arms around her with large hands on her back, slowly pressing in in massage circles.

"We need them to answer for this." Dennis told Booth, his eyes watery, too. "She was our little girl. She wasn't supposed to go before us. That's not the way it's supposed to be."

 _Life is full of surprises._ I never liked it when people complained about the circle of life or whatnot when they were sad that their kid had died, either on TV or in reality. It was just frustrating. _Supposed_ to be? What did that even mean? Normal? Bad things happened, there was no helping that sometimes, and if it weren't for humans being seriously wacked up animals, then we probably wouldn't have to bury our own offspring so often, but the downfall of having the capacity to be complex and mentally sentient was that there were that many more ways for our brains to become twisted and atypical, allowing "abnormal" people to do "inhuman" things.

Booth just seemed to get it. One of those things that you learned from having a kid, I guessed. He gazed over at the small framed picture of his son on the desk. "I know," he told them quietly, ripping his eyes away from his boy. "We'll find Kyle, I promise."

* * *

 **A/N: Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	9. Mother and Child in the Bay, Part Four

The FBI had vending machines, and I had successfully found them on one of my first trips to the building. Vending machines were about half of the reason I was even still alive, since I used them instead of actually eating balances meals most of the time. I could sustain myself for an entire day on about five dollars, so why not? I was just munching on a granola bar and reflecting on how I should change that, considering that the man stocking the machines had recognized me in seconds and greeted me by name. Clearly I was getting a bit of a reputation for being a vending machine regular.

I preferred the reputation where I had shot someone in the leg.

My phone started to go off in my jeans while I was walking down the hall back towards Booth's office. I had it set on vibrate so that it didn't disturb others or draw attention to me, but I felt it just fine. I moved my granola bar to my non-dominant hand and answered my phone after a brief glance at the caller ID screen.

"You kill it, we ID it, how can I help you?" I greeted sardonically into the speaker.

Brennan hesitated to answer, unsure she'd gotten the right number. I could practically hear her asking aloud who she'd reached, but explaining to herself that she _had_ gotten my voice in response. _"What?"_

I shook my head and resumed walking. I probably should've reserved that greeting for Hodgins or Angela. "I was being funny," I explained.

 _"_ _Oh,"_ Brennan answered unconvincingly. I don't think she got why it was funny. _"Um, I need you to come back to the lab. Bring Booth, we need him, too."_

"What exactly are we doing?" I asked curiously. It wasn't weird that I was wanted back, but needing Booth for something in the Medico-Legal lab was unusual. He hung out because his partners worked there, but he had very few skills with the lab equipment.

 _"_ _I need you to stab the body,"_ she explained.

I stopped dead in the middle of the hallway and counted to three. No, I was still pretty sure she had said _stab the body._ I rubbed my forehead and hoped no one saw me looking dumbfounded and asked what my conversation was about.

"… Did the murderer not do enough of that already?" I asked unsurely, hoping that we were, at the very least, talking about the body in our lab that was already dead. Maybe I was high. Was I high? I didn't think Booth was very likely to have laced my water bottle.

Evidently, my inquiry was enough to make Brennan realize that I needed context a lot more than I needed to stab anyone. She hurried to explain after it dawned on her that I was missing a lot of the necessary information. _"Hodgins and Zach have created a replica of Carlie Richardson's height and weight and added sensors to measure Newtons."_

"Oh," I said, making sure to vary my tone upwards in pitch so she knew I got it that time. Actually, that sounded pretty cool. Continuing back to my FBI friend's office, I swung around to Booth's door and knocked. Then I opened it without waiting. "Okay, see, future reference, you should really lead with that. Hey, hey, Booth, take the phone." I crossed to his desk and offered it to him, hoping that Brennan would lead with the same opening line that she had with me. "Dr. Brennan wants you for something."

He should've questioned why I was so eager for him to take my phone, but he seemed pretty absorbed in something else that he was up to on his desk, chewing the cap of an ink pen between his teeth. He capped the pen and took the phone, holding it between his shoulder and cheek while he leaned back in his chair and stretched.

"Hey, Bones. What's up?" He greeted with a lazy grin. That grin lasted less than five seconds before it fell, to be replaced with an expression of abject horror. "You want me to _what?!"_

I sat down in the chair opposite him, snickering into my hand. Next time he would think twice about my motives. One leg kicked up over the other and I made myself comfortable, shifting to find a better angle to lean back at, elbow up on the wooden armrest.

Booth dropped his pen and rubbed his brow with a pained frown. "Okay, I'm stabbing the body," he agreed uncomfortably. "You know what, that's great. I'll be there in twenty. But, in the future, you're just going to have to ask me differently, Bones, because you know what? _Come over to my place to stab a body_ – that is just _freaky!_ "

I snorted at his paraphrasing. Booth glared at me over the desk. I put my hands up but had to keep looking down. I wasn't ready to act like I was completely innocent yet.

Through Booth's open office door, we heard a lot of noise coming in from the surrounding agents out in the bullpen at their cubicle desks. There was a public printer and fax machine, chatter for both work causes and for personal mingling, computer sounds, footsteps and pens and rattling coins and pencils in mugs. The FBI wasn't solemn, like a library, the way I had thought it would've been. In fact, the more time I spent there, the more it seemed like a comfortable place to be. A teenager whose parents shadily disappeared, who had a job handling alcohol she wasn't legally old enough to touch, who lived illegally on her own through some craftily-made lies and copied signatures… well, I wasn't exactly at home when I'd been a suspect. Then things came into the open, I was accepted instead of punished, and I became more of a normal fixture. Just like the lab which had seemed way out of my league, I had grown used to it over time. Sometimes I still felt displaced and surreal, but I never felt threatened.

I had grown familiar with the noises, the sounds, the voices of the agents I didn't necessarily know by name but that would recognize me on sight. I'd become a consultant, and a regular one, at that – like Shawn Spencer, who spent a ton of time at the SBPD. My parentage had been kept under wraps, exposed only to Cullen (since my biological father was technically my primary partner in the bureau, that could've gotten messy if someone found out we'd hidden that from the higher-ups), but no one was ever surprised if I was there without an active case.

So that was why it was just plain strange to see the attention being sucked up in the direction of the office I was in while Booth explained to Brennan that he didn't know what Newton-meters were as patiently as possible, and a blonde loudly storming down the hall, red-faced, straightened hair swinging and her face set in a furious scowl.

"Seeley, you son of a bitch!" Parker's mother shouted. Anyone who hadn't already noticed the signs of an impending catfight caught on quickly enough when Rebecca's voice boomed around the bullpen.

 _Well, I did want to see you, but not when you were this pissed._ I'd fight anyone threatening someone else's safety, but Rebecca's fights with Booth were probably the exception. Aside from being reasonably confident she wasn't one of the exes who would stab their pencils through their co-parent's throat, I wanted to stay on good terms with her, and that meant not actively siding against her in personal arguments. If nothing else, then Parker needed to have someone advocating for him; it was entirely possible that both parents would focus on themselves in a passionate rage, which was fine, as long as someone, whether it was a mediator or one of them, eventually brought Parker's needs back to the center of attention.

My concern for Parker was interesting to me. I'd started thinking of him as my little brother months ago, when everything was surreal and strange and Booth was my _dad_ and, what, why would Hodgins _voluntarily_ share his wealth to add a troublemaking kid he barely knew to his insurance plan? I didn't adopt people into my fold easily or rapidly, but Parker had been an easy transition to make – if I transferred that bewilderment to a new brother who was too little to abuse me, who was dependent on my compassion instead of the other way around, then I didn't have to face my daddy issues head-on.

Booth and Brennan were still a class of their own, as was Zach, and Hodgins and Angela had their places, too. No one set was necessarily favored, just trusted in different ways, friendships different, reliant on different things and forged through different contexts. Parker hadn't been a big part of my life or my relationship with Booth. Would I have been so thoughtful to him in this situation if I still only thought of him as my coworker's son? I liked to think so; I knew better than anyone how hostility between parents could convert into hostility towards children.

The FBI agent stood up from his chair quickly, nervousness covering his face like a dark cloud. Rebecca's visit was not a planned one. He passed the phone back to me. Normally I wouldn't have reciprocated the action and let him hastily give it back, but I recognized something important when I saw it.

 _"_ _Who was that?"_ Brennan asked when I told her that I was back on the line.

"Um, this ship is sinking quickly," I answered, unwilling to give out too many details. I winced. It was Booth's problem to handle, and while I would figure it out for myself just by being there, Brennan was generally a little less tactful about what she tried to talk to him about. If he wanted her to know about it, then he would tell her. "We'll… probably be more than twenty minutes."

"Oh, I – Rebecca! Wow. You look _great."_ Booth beamed at her unconvincingly, holding his arms out in invitation for a friendly hug.

She stormed into the office. I melted to the side, backing up to the wall and being as physically unobtrusive as possible. The streaks in my hair naturally drew attention to the color, and my height was another factor, yet, regardless of these things, Rebecca didn't so much as glance in my general direction, the fury in her stance propelling her right over to Booth's desk, standing in high heels with a leather purse over her shoulder.

"Yeah, okay, _save it,"_ she snapped. Booth hurriedly lowered his arms before he annoyed her any further. "Because I'm gonna need a lot more than compliments from you right now!"

I could hear the worry in her voice when Brennan asked, _"What's going on?"_ I hadn't forgotten I was talking to someone as much as I had gotten distracted by the proceedings and it hadn't yet occurred to me to hang up.

I grimaced and slipped to the left, closer to the doorway and further from the arguing adults.

"Don't worry about it," I whispered, bringing a hand up to cover my mouth. Not even Booth cared enough to look over when I regretfully had to open my mouth and make sound. "It's a – it's a monogamy thing. I need to go."

Although she still didn't have an answer that actually explained anything, Brennan said okay and she hung up her phone first. I hoped that Booth would confide in her later on, since I wasn't sure I wanted to be asked about what a 'monogamy thing' meant in the context of Booth's public FBI office.

"Okay, just… keep it down a little bit, because I'm at _work,_ alright?" Booth's eyes flicked up to the open door Rebecca had come in through, pushing it widely open and leaving it that way. He gestured around his office indicatively.

If anything, Rebecca only raised her voice in response. "You sent agents to investigate Drew?" She accused. I cringed and inched further over towards the door. I had warned him that something like this might have happened, that his precautions might be taken as an offense. He would have to handle the consequences, but they didn't need to be expanded upon where everyone he worked with could have an ear into his private life. "Because you're going to stop that, _now!"_

"Listen, I'm just being cautious," Booth defended himself. I made another face while I pushed the door shut and guided it the last several inches with extreme caution, ever-so-careful not to let it click too loudly. "What do you really know about this guy, anyway?"

I made another longing stare at the door. I wanted to be on the other side of it. Yet this entire fight was, if I was correct, being caused over a problem with me. Booth never would've looked into Drew if he was having the normal amount of time with his son, time which was being taken away because Rebecca didn't want Parker to be around _me._ I was at the root of the problem, and I expected that I would have to fix it, but not before Booth acknowledged the repercussions of going behind Rebecca's back.

"I know – I-I-I know that he has a good job," Rebecca said the first thing that came to mind, annoyed that she was the one answering the questions, and astounded that Booth would turn it back around on her when she was the one whose privacy had been violated. "And I know that he fixes stuff around the house when he says he's going to, and I know that Parker is crazy about him, and he's not terrified every time he goes off to work that he's going to get shot!"

I sucked on my tongue. I hadn't considered that… Parker wasn't sheltered. The television didn't hide how dangerous being an agent could be. It exaggerated it, though that didn't exactly help. Parker liked me pretty well, I thought. I knew he thought Booth had hung the moon. How many times had Rebecca had to assure Parker that Booth would be safe, even though she herself had doubts? Was it really fair of me to expect to be permitted to be part of the boy's life when I had the same risk associated with my life? Someone working for the mafia had tried to murder me, for God's sake. If I were Rebecca, then those priorities would've been my first considerations, too.

Booth didn't think of it like I did. Instead of seeing it as Rebecca looking out for Parker, he saw it as a slight against his parenting; keeping the streets safe, but at the expense of his son's concern. Putting his hands on his waist, he turned from Rebecca, looking at the bookshelves with his jaw set firmly.

"And I know that I love him!" Rebecca said to Booth next. An expression of shock flew over her face, but she didn't take it back. Booth's neck snapped around to look at her, face going unreadable. My desire to leave increased. "I love him," Rebecca breathed, not taking it back. "And now everyone at work thinks he's a criminal."

Booth leaned into his desk. "Well, he's been spotted with explosives." I didn't have a word to describe his voice, but I thought there was a touch of jealousy and more than a little bit of resentment.

Rebecca threw her arms up with exasperation, her right hand catching in her hair and flipping blonde strands up. "He is a _construction foreman._ He does _demolition._ You must have figured that out when you were doing all your snooping!"

I rubbed my forehead. Booth really hadn't done himself any favors. When he took things out of context like that, it was no wonder his ex looked homicidal. He carried a gun, which sounded like it could be bad if it wasn't included that he was also a field agent. I regularly handled human bones, but that was because of the _context_ in which I handled the bones. I was a scientist. The acceptability was reliant on the surrounding information.

"Okay, well, I have a _right_ to know who's around my son, alright?" Booth rose to the challenge and refused to back down, no matter how badly it was going for him. The closed door definitely helped with the volume getting back out, but I doubted it had soundproofed them completely. "He spends more time with Parker than I do!"

Rebecca's eyebrows went up. "Okay, and you think that I would put Parker in _danger?"_ Her tone went tetchy. I nixed an imaginary line over my throat to Booth in indication. He did _not_ want to go down that road. For that matter, neither did I.

 _This is getting out of hand._

"I hate to insert myself here," I meekly coughed and held up a hand hesitantly at my eye-level. "I _really_ do, but not only are people biased and subjective, people _lie."_ I swallowed my anxiety about getting in the middle of it and risked making eye contact with Rebecca. Booth was torn between relief at not being the sole focus of her ire and reluctance to include another person in a personal argument. Rebecca looked testy, daring me to try to disagree with her in a discussion I had no place in. "Someone I trusted put me and people I care about in a lot of danger." I made sure she knew Kenton was someone I had put my faith in. I'd been fallible. "Wanting to know who Parker's around is a natural thing. Biologically, it's the imperative to protect the longevity of your offspring's life."

With Brennan, that would've worked and been a welcomed bullet point. With those two, it… was not appreciated by either of them.

"Less objectively," I added, staying very close to the wall. "I think it's the imperative of any attentive parent."

Rebecca turned back to Booth, holding a hand up to point at me, but then realized that I was capable of coherently explaining myself to her face. She turned back, putting her hip out and focusing her weight onto the heel of her left shoe, driving the stiletto into the short carpet. "Thank you for your input, but you are _not_ his guardian," she reminded me with flinty eyes. "And I don't understand why you're even in this office!"

"Because neither of you remembered to close the door and this is a public place, so I figured you'd appreciate your personal issues remaining somewhat private," I snippily replied, not responding well to that scolding, maternal tone. She could be mad at me if she wanted, I knew I had risked that, but she did not have the right to sound like my parent. Even Booth hardly had that right. I was not her child, and I was not close enough to being a child for her to use the excuse of it being an old habit with Parker.

"Let me ask you a question." Booth moved around the side of his desk, taking away the barricade between himself and his ex-girlfriend. "Why is it that you keep all the men in your life such a secret?" He cocked his head tauntingly, and not in a friendly way.

I groaned. "That is _not_ supposed to be the next approach," I said to him.

Rebecca held her hands out, motioning to Booth from his shoulders down. "Because you are _always_ interrogating or intimidating them, and it – it freaks them out!" She exclaimed bitterly.

"Well, I mean, c'mon," he chuckled, finding the reminder funny. Rebecca looked particularly ticked off that he was taking it lightly. I could see that he took the situation seriously, but didn't think very highly of the others that he scared off. I sighed. That right there was a prime example of why I didn't want to bother with the typical teen relationships. Rebecca wasn't a territory to defend. "A lot of them are a little strange. I mean, the guy with the tattoos on his neck?"

 _What's wrong with tattoos?_ I wondered, sending Booth a disgruntled look. I liked tattoos. Most of the time they looked really cool, and as long as the only person making the decision to get the tattoos is the person wearing them, then what's wrong with having some ink under your skin?

Rebecca held a hand up to stop Booth before he went any further past a line. Much as I hated disagreeing with Booth on important matters, I had to take Rebecca's side on that one. He had proved to himself with Kenton that not everyone he trusted was exactly golden, so acting as though his judgment was great where Rebecca's was lacking was hypocritical of him. He had no right to intimidate the people she wanted to spend time with away from her. It was immature and disrespectful.

"I don't even _have_ to let you see Parker, okay?" When she reminded him of how their custody arrangement had come to be, Booth went still and his face darkened. I was not eager to see how this would end. "Not legally. That's one of the _upsides_ of not being married."

He took a fast step into her space. _"Don't,"_ he growled. Rebecca pretended to look sarcastically surprised, as if she was just realizing, _oh, so that's what it takes to get you to discuss this seriously._ "I'm a good father," Booth said lowly with conviction. "You know that."

Rebecca shut her mouth with a click, holding her head up to face him rebelliously. Her mutiny didn't seem as stressful or as powerful when she didn't have words to back it up, and the woman seemed to be having a bit of difficulty formulating an effective argument for her case that Booth couldn't refute.

Finally, she looked down to his chest. It was easier for her to speak to his chest than to his eyes. "You're going to stop trying to run things," she stated with finality, both of them quieter and calmer. "I've got things in my life that have _nothing_ to do with you."

Booth reached for her arm, catching her elbow with a loose hand before she could fully turn away. She looked back over her shoulder, biting on her lip. "Look, we are _always_ gonna have something to do with each other, because we share a _son."_

Rebecca shook her head as if to argue that Parker didn't give Booth the inherent right to influence her life. I agreed that Booth had a right to access Parker, but he needed to go about it in a way that didn't affect Rebecca's personal relationships.

"Drew's a good man." She said, sticking up for her boyfriend and holding her chin up proudly. "And you need to back off, or you're never gonna see Parker again, I swear." I didn't have to know either of them to see the alarm in Booth's face as he took the threat for what it was. I hadn't ever seen him appear more frightened, save for _maybe_ when I'd passed out from blood loss, but that was a memory hazy and blurred at best and I didn't think it was safe to rely on my observations from then. "Back off," Rebecca repeated less forcefully, seeing as it hit home.

Too shaken to stop her again, Booth let her pull her arm out of his grip with hardly any effort and she hoisted her purse further up onto her shoulder, tucking her hair behind her ears and leaving the office. I made a wide step to the side to get out of her way while she opened the door, and she brought it swinging shut after her.

Booth went to his desk and put his hands on the edge, leaning over it with his head down. I stood awkwardly, unsure what to do. Was I supposed to suggest how to make amends? Tell him it was an empty threat, that Rebecca wouldn't actually do that? What if I was supposed to go comfort him by telling him lies, contradicting my own beliefs that he wasn't even a little bit in the wrong?

The one thing about the situation I knew was that I felt incredibly guilty. I hadn't picked up on the trend soon enough, and Booth had taken matters into his own hands, creating a problem between himself and his ex that hadn't even existed and wouldn't have, if I'd been more observant and done something about it. Now he was thinking that Rebecca was keeping Parker from him because she questioned his competence as the boy's father. Why hadn't she just come out and _said_ that I was the problem?! That could be easily worked around.

Of course it would've bothered Booth, but that was nothing compared to being told that she wouldn't let him have a role in his son's life. I couldn't hold my tongue any longer. "Booth-" _It's not you or Drew, it's me. She doesn't want Parker around me. Rebecca doesn't think I'm good for Parker._

He held up a hand and effectively shushed me. I was already antsy and uncomfortable about telling him, so I stopped talking and lowered my head, looking at the carpet with a frown.

"Don't," he said tightly. "Okay? Because I don't need to hear an _I told you so_ to know that it blew up."

I looked up again. Did he _really_ think I was feeling _smug_ about what had happened, of all things? Pushing aside the offense I took at the assumption, I held my arms protectively over my stomach. "I wasn't going to say I told you so," I said pointedly, although I had. "I was _going_ to say that you _are_ a good father, and she knows it. She didn't even dare to contest it." I turned my head towards my right shoulder and sighed. There was an agreement that we didn't talk about his father or my foster families. We just didn't handle it well, but… "You're not your father, and that's a damn good reason to forgive yourself for making a mistake." His dad had acted badly to take anger out on his children. Booth made a poor decision in the interest of _protecting_ his son, and that made all the difference.

* * *

Booth was in a mood even when we got to the lab, but we didn't have to go far before we found the conglomeration of scientists up on the main platform in the Medico-Legal center. Angela was farthest to the side, leaning against the railing and looking personally offended by the object of everyone else's fascination – a mannequin doll standing on a platform, raised by a beam and supported upright, dressed in modest maternity clothes. The jeans were pinned to stay up and the pant legs fell limply when the legs of the mannequin cut off. The fabric over the midriff was loosely gathered over the body's front.

"Here comes Kyle," Saroyan quipped as she saw us. The pathologist was the first to notice. I slid my card from the lanyard and Booth went up the stairs first. I followed more slowly, going widely around the mannequin, unsettled by how strange it looked. If it was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and sunglasses, it would've been much less disturbing.

"Ha, ha," Booth sarcastically laughed, making a juvenile face at her. I was sadistically delighted that he was taking offense to something she did for once. "Funny. Don't we have something to stab?"

" _This,"_ Angela said in offering, waving at the mannequin with a nauseated look on her face. "I hate my job," she then glumly proclaimed.

I considered the mannequin again now that I was closer. A computer was on a rolling stand with the wheels locked to the left and cords were trailing on the floor to the base of the stand, then disappearing up the hems of the pants and shirt, red and white cords secured with tape to stay out of the way. A thick black cord connected the computer to what looked like a knife cut from actual metal. The handle was slim but had a hilt to prevent accidental hand-slicing, and the tip was a sharp point that arched out to a wider blade.

I looked at the electrodes and then the recreated knife and decided loudly, "I _love_ my job." I made a joking motion like I was rolling up my sleeves to get down to business, but of course I actually left them down. Personal comfort combined with Saroyan's presence ensured that my arms and torso stayed covered.

Hodgins took a look at me where he was programming the computer and chuckled at the enthusiastic look on my face. That would be just what I needed to get a handle on the desires to commit violent actions. I had plenty to be frustrated about, and some things – like Parker and Rebecca – were too personal to people other than myself to share with Amy, my sixteen-year-old therapist.

"Yeah, yeah, calm down, Xena," he snorted. "You're looking a bit too excited there."

Zach stood by the mannequin like a demonstrator. "From the depth of the stab wounds, we can tell the approximate force required in Newton meters to inflict the marks we see on the bones." He indicated the general area where most of the stabs on Carlie's body were located, above her womb but very heavily centered towards the front of her body.

"So we have to measure the amount of force generated when we stab to give us the size, weight, and body type of the assailant." Brennan explained to Booth, who still looked more miffed and slighted than excited. I didn't even really _need_ the explanation on how it pertained to the case; I would happily take the knife to the dummy for no reason other than that I had anger to spare and was getting sick of acting like I wasn't pissed at the world.

Booth eyed it suspiciously. "You had to dress her up?"

"The clothes she wore figure into the resistance to the blows," Zach defended against Booth's tone, looking again at the mannequin and seeing no real problems with how it looked.

Hodgins picked up the knife by the handle and tipped it up, so the hilt slid down to his hand. He turned it over, looked at it with fondness, and unwound the cord underneath it, dropping it down to the floor and giving it more slack as he carried the knife to Brennan, who stepped forward to take it from him, both of them careful not to touch the sharp cutting side.

"The knife is consistent with the one that caused the wounds." Brennan held it up after taking it from Hodgins, and the entomologist went to take her place between Saroyan and Booth. She touched the tip of her index finger lightly to the top of the knife, a light from the skylights reflecting brightly on the smooth side. "We fitted it with an instrumental blade that will give us a digital readout of the Newton meters of each stab."

"It's a dual-mass drop system." Zach said, expecting that to have a great meaning.

Saroyan held up a hand and made the annoying talking motion. "All I hear is blah, blah, blah."

"This is so awesome," I grinned, keeping my eyes on the knife eagerly. I also kind of wanted to see Zach stab the mannequin. In the entire time I'd known him, I didn't think he'd ever said anything that inclined himself even to hypothetical violence.

Hodgins looked at the vaguely disgusted stare Booth was sending the props, alternating between the knife and the dummy. "Cliff Notes version," he summarized, slapping Booth on the back, "We all stab, one of us is the killer."

"Thank you," Booth replied grimly, although going by his face, the sincerity of that was in question.

"Sort of like a real creepy party game," Angela commented, her lack of appreciation for this rare opportunity very clear.

Brennan turned to stand sideways, her left side to the mannequin and her right to the assembly line we made. Zach moved out from behind the dummy and came to stand on my other side, putting me between himself and Booth, and then held his hands behind his back. The anthropologist held the blade up in her dominant right hand.

"The violence of the attack shows rage, so everyone should stab as hard as they can," she advised, testing the weight of the replicated murder weapon by making overhanded motions, the kind of attack that felt most natural to her.

Booth just motioned for her to get on with it, he and Angela looking mutually pained by the sight they were about to bear witness to, both looking as though they'd rather be literally anywhere else but the lab while this was going on. Brennan nodded, shifted around to the body, surveyed it contemplatively, and went to work.

Brennan started stabbing suddenly. When the knife tore through the clothes and made the first impact, driving the blade through whatever it was shop dummies were made of, the ripping noise made Angela squeak quietly. Hodgins sent her a sympathetic glance, but was too amused for it to have the right affect, and she glared at him. I gathered from the woman's aim that it wasn't the location of stabbing that mattered, but the force that the device could measure. Her face was fixed with anger. It could've been at any number of people, and the first person I thought of would've been her new boss. The way she stabbed, though, with a contemptuous sneer on her face, brought another person entirely to mind – McVicar, whom she'd never gotten to have closure from, as he was murdered before his trial.

I wondered who I'd most like to stab. There were a lot of people, to be sure. McVicar, of course – he had killed Rose and Nick Kirkland, the couple that took me in for a brief time. He'd possibly threatened Aaron. I also knew he terrified Russ, whom I now considered a friend, and had slaughtered my roommate and mentor's mother, so there were plenty of reasons to hate the bastard.

Jamie Kenton was a second option. It would've been nothing less than what he deserved, after stabbing me with full intentions of first-degree murder; as far as I knew, he was in a super-max security, protected from the mafia family he had admitted to working for, but with no chance of ever getting out. Epps was another person who came to mind. Everything about him repelled me, but rather than dig up that stone, I'd have preferred to just let it lie. Epps was someone from the past, and I shouldn't have to ever deal with him again. Rebecca and Saroyan were both definitely components of my stress, but despite my aggressive disposition, I truly had no desire to harm either of them beyond some sharp words.

Brennan wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist as she finished, rolled her shoulders, smiled with satisfaction, and held out the knife towards the watching spectators. I stuck my hand up in the air and waved it excitedly. Hodgins rolled up his sleeves and went for it first. I still forgot sometimes that I was allowed to act like an adult employee rather than a student.

Hodgins stabbed meanly, but he was enjoying it. Brennan looked like she'd been imagining sinking the blade into an actual person, but Hodgins had a light in his eyes and a grin on his face. He struck the mannequin over and over again, bringing his arm down as heavily as he could.

Saroyan reluctantly went next. In spite of her grudging compliance, she had a hell of an arm, and went right for the area where the heart would've been. She rolled her eyes and stared at the wall past the dummy's shoulder while she stabbed hard. Instead of making swinging motions, she thrusted it in and out, barely taking the take to remove the blade in its entirety before plunging it back in.

 _"_ _This better work!"_ She furiously exclaimed, refusing to watch what she was doing.

I got to go next. It wasn't foreign to hold knives, especially not when I had spent a lot of time at the lab working out murder weapons with Zach and Brennan in the past. I still remembered stabbing a surgeon's tools into clay blocks to take molds for comparison purposes. Most of them were just different, and the knives I held most frequently were of the pocket or kitchen variety, whereas this one may have had the shape of a kitchen knife's blade, but the hilt and handle were different.

When throwing a Frisbee, the flick of the wrist was vital. When stabbing someone – which I had done once, though I didn't like to remember the events that surrounded it – it wasn't a conscious decision to rotate my wrist. It just kind of happened with or without intentional thought. Knife or not, my body recognized that I was hitting someone, and angled my wrist so my fist would have hit fairly flatly on their body if my hand made it all the way. The knife went in at a downwards angle with every hit, but I plunged the knife viciously into the chest of the raised body in a place that would've been fatal after just one stab.

Hodgins cheered me on. "Yeah, get your revenge, Xena!" He was the one person at the lab who sometimes acted like me being stabbed still greatly bothered him. I knew Booth was frustrated whenever he had to recall it, but he tried not to talk about it, just like we didn't talk about my biological mother or his abusive father. As for me, I tried to be impassive. No matter what I felt, it had happened. I appreciated that Hodgins cared enough to still be upset by it and have a grudge against Kenton, but personally, I was stabbing no one in particular.

I was stabbing the universe. What had I ever done to it? So I wasn't the nicest person. I accepted that. I never really tried to be. What mattered to me was that I was loyal to the end for the people I did care about. I'd stayed with Booth for his sake even when I wanted to be anywhere else when a friendly fire incident was exposed after a cover up. I went hiking around in the New Mexican deserts for _hours_ several days in a row just because Angela had wanted help. If anyone ever tried to attack Zach or Hodgins, God help them. I had never killed anyone and I'd never done harm without a very good reason, so I thought I was meeting the requirements for being an okay-ish person.

It was everything else that pissed me off. My mother gave me up and didn't bother to tell my father I existed. It was better when I thought neither of them would've had anything to do with me. It meant that I was just another case of irresponsible sex or failed contraceptives. With the revelation that she had kept me a secret, I felt like I'd had a childhood _stolen_ from me. This woman who was either too dumb or too irresponsible to keep herself from getting pregnant had not only failed to abort, but then had given her baby up to a string of families that would abuse her and condition her into fear and pain and secrecy, when, if she'd shared with her boyfriend, then I might've not been forced through hell after doing nothing to deserve it.

I didn't know what really would've happened. Booth had been in high school; his father was more likely to get custody than he was as a minor, and for all I knew that had been before his grandfather stepped in and kicked his dad out, so maybe I would've been mistreated either way, but at least I would've had family members that were trustworthy. I could've known my father, grown up with my uncle, and been taken under my great-grandfather's protection sooner or later, and instead I got to grow up feeling unwanted and unloved and unsafe.

I had had to teach my little brother that he couldn't touch me without making sure I saw him moving to do so. My father had had to grab my hands one day and hold my arms up so I didn't punch _him_. I considered Hodgins and Zach to be some of the best friends anyone could have ever asked for and it took an adrenaline rush and a sense of scarce safety just to touch their hands. How was I supposed to hug someone when I _wasn't_ injured? How was I supposed to have a normal relationship with someone if I fell in love – how was I going to kiss or hug or hold hands or have sex when I didn't like it when a four-year-old touched my leg?

She had never hit me, but it was easy to blame _her_ for everything I'd suffered, and the luxuries that teenagers got to take for granted that I had been deprived of.

I stopped stabbing just as quickly as I'd started as my mind blanked out. _Her._ I'd started just for the hell of it but it became personal and private very rapidly. It was impossible for anyone else to know what I'd been thinking, but I swallowed and was antsy to move on.

 _Add my mother to the list, then._

"Your turn, Zach!" I declared, holding both hands up, knife still in one of them.

Zach's turn was uneventful, but probably the funniest. He understood the mechanics and what he was supposed to do, but when the time came, he looked at the spear-like end of the knife, looked at the mannequin, raised his arm with purpose, and then poked the dummy passively in the chest with a bemused frown. The knife hardly even penetrated the mannequin.

Booth raised his eyebrows, Saroyan hid a smile behind her hand, and Hodgins and I both shared an exasperated but fond grin behind Zach's back.

The FBI agent got the job over with quickly, jabbing the mannequin while looking to his right with a very annoyed face on. He tapped his foot while he did it half a dozen times, enough for the instrument to really get an accurate measurement of his strength, and then shoved it out to whoever was left to go next. When Angela stepped up and took the blade like it was infected with something insidious, Booth wiped his hands on his slacks and huffed.

"That was weird," he complained.

"I feel so much better about everything in life," I lied, plastering on a serene grin and looking at Booth cheerfully.

Angela held her hand weirdly, looking away and closing her eyes while she stabbed at the prop, groaning the first time she heard the tearing material. She shuddered while she went at it, like someone would sweep at a spider up in the corner of the ceiling. Hodgins rescued her from herself while laughing.

"Okay, okay," he said, relieving her of her pain. The artist couldn't get the knife away from her fast enough and was relieved to turn it over to the entomologist and get back to Brennan's side.

Hodgins coiled up the black extension cord between the computer and the knife, then put them both on the tray shelf underneath the top that the computer rested on. "Results?" Booth asked impatiently. The exercise had not been as cathartic for him as it should have been.

Zach went to go read the results while Hodgins started to take care of the cords on the mannequin, which now looked like a Halloween decoration with all the rips in the clothes and holes in the torso. The entomologist started to detach the electrodes that had been taped on with white medical tape and gathered them up in his hands, draping the cords over each other.

"The force used to make the injuries on the bones was twenty-four Newton meters." Zach started telling the computer to compute the data and hit the enter key. The actual results generated much faster than any of the stabbing activities had been. "And the winner is, with twenty-four Newton meters…" Zach paused, distracted by Hodgins' mocking air drumroll, but was pushed back on topic by Booth's glare. "Angela."

Angela opened her eyes and looked around. "What?"

"Congratulations," Hodgins said with way too much delight, considering that Angela had been the most freaked out about the experiment.

Still finding it hard to believe, she looked at Brennan for verification. "Really?!"

Brennan shrugged. "Height and weight?" She asked for the record.

"Oh, God." Angela covered her eyes. "Uh… five eight." She put her hands on her hips and looked away, lowering her head as her voice trailed off. "One hundred and… _mm…_ " she got incomprehensible.

"What?" Brennan asked for clarification while Hodgins smirked at the artist's discomfort.

"One thirty-five," the woman snapped, embarrassed. She caught sight of Hodgins' expression and scowled at him. "It's all muscle," she swore. I just blinked. She _did_ realize that was a perfectly normal weight for her sex and height, didn't she?

"Doesn't fit Kyle," I told Saroyan in particular while biting the inside of my cheek to keep from celebrating. The more evidence that proved her wrong, the better.

Brennan opened up a folder and checked the information on the health records. "Karen Tyler is five seven and one hundred thirty-two pounds." Or, at least, she had been last time anyone had officially checked. The one inch and three pounds wasn't going to have a very dramatic effect on how her strength compared to Angela's.

"So Kyle's girlfriend kills Carlie, so they can be together," Booth put together, drawing off of the photograph that Carlie's parents had supplied us with. Karen had known Kyle Richardson beforehand, and lying about knowing him while his wife was around certainly pointed a finger in that direction.

I envisioned the bawling blonde over the kitchen sink committing cold blooded murder, but couldn't really see it. She looked too torn apart just from getting a hit from her boyfriend. Sure, that would probably shake most people, myself included, but a bloody lip was nothing compared to the blood and gore of stabbing someone as many times as Carlie's killer had.

I was reluctant to think that Karen had been the vicious and bloodthirsty killer that we'd figured the bad guy would be, but I couldn't argue with proof. I just had to consider the variables. "Makes as much sense as anything," I reasoned slowly, looking over at Angela sympathetically as I prompted everyone to recall her moment of weakness. "Maybe most of the stabbing was less in fury and more in panic – Angela looked pretty freaked."

Angela just gave me a _duh, of course I was_ look in response and looked up at the ceiling. She was probably telling me silently that just because I had appeared to enjoy it didn't mean that I represented the normal demographic, and she considered herself the most normal squint anyway.

"Well, then why did Kyle run?" She debated back.

Saroyan surprised all of us by speaking up. She'd been so quiet that at least half of us had almost forgotten that she was there, busy off in her head considering the facts presented in front of her. "Maybe he didn't," she said suddenly, getting everyone to look at her. I bit my tongue, not to prevent myself from saying anything, but out of confusion. She couldn't argue with the fact that Kyle had gone in the wind. "It sounds nuts, but if she's the killer, maybe Karen got rid of him, too, to keep him from talking."

Angela frowned with worry for someone she didn't even know, but I kept watching Saroyan. I saw that she was sincere and I nodded slowly to her. She didn't see the sign of my approval and I didn't see a reason why it was important that she did. She still had a ways to go – Kyle wasn't the only person she'd wronged in this lab.

* * *

Booth paced by the exam table. "Okay, so you're sure there's no way Richardson could have made these wounds?"

Brennan shook her head, sticking firmly to the theory supported by all of the evidence, both from the in-depth analyses of the bones and the experiment that we had all just played parts in. "With his strength, the blows would have sliced deeper into the bone."

Hodgins picked up a piece of rib bone and held it up in front of me, looking at my face over the broken end. "Well, these seem to go right through," he said, widening his eyes as he turned the break towards his face to look at the uneven cut.

"Well, those were delivered after she was on the ground," Brennan explained, leaning over the backlit table and demonstrating a hard downward motion with her arm. Gravity and the lack of a place to twist away to would have helped the knife to sink further and deeper into the victim.

"Trust me, that helps," I mumbled, staring at the bone Hodgins was holding without realizing that my vision was losing focus, staring more into space. My eyes dulled and my voice dropped.

I remembered lying on my back, arm burning, body sore, mind racing and head aching, scalp stinging from my hair being pulled, back popped from being sat on and attacked. My hair tangled and in my face, sweat sticking my fringe to my forehead, heavy weight on my hips and the initial pause between _he's going to stab me_ and _holy hell that hurts_ , that split-second where my nervous system didn't quite seem to know what to do with the newest sensation of a knife making a home in my abdomen.

Hodgins stilled, lowering the bone he held. He wasn't the only one whose mood was killed. Brennan leaned on the edge of the table, hands against the silver steel edge, and looking down with her lips tightly pressed. The FBI agent stopped pacing, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes, a look of pain on his face as he mouthed something. I looked back to Hodgins, apologetic, wishing I'd just kept my mouth shut. I had to stop saying things to upset them. If I'm going to be sad about something that happened to me months ago, I should keep it to myself; it had been long enough. They should be able to live and talk and go about their jobs without being reminded of it just because I couldn't forget it.

Hodgins set down the bone on the table, dusted off his glove, and awkwardly started to offer some form of concern. "Hey, are you okay to hear this?" He asked with a concerned and upset frown, putting one hand on his hip and the other gesturing to the door as if inviting me to go somewhere with him. "Because if it's too much-"

"I'm fine," I interrupted swiftly, well aware that I didn't _sound_ fine. I'd been hired to do a job and I needed to earn my keep. It was bad enough that I was basically freeloading off of Brennan and Hodgins, leeching off of her rent and utilities and taking up money from Hodgins through prescriptions and physical therapy and phone bills.

How had I gone from being in poverty and having no one to being the ghetto version of Little Orphan Annie, just without the curly red hair? A bestselling novelist and an heir to a successful company were paying my living expenses. I didn't have a Manhattan or San Francisco skyline out my bedroom window, but I lived _very_ comfortably, and I hardly paid anything out of pocket. Not that I had all that much in my pocket to pay with until very recently, but still…

In reality, I definitely wasn't fine. I was bitter. I was angry. The exercise in venting anger hadn't been venting, it'd been a therapy session, and now my mental Freud was telling me that I hated my biological mother, this woman I'd never met, and I was thinking about her because I was ticked at _Parker's_ mother, Rebecca, another important woman in Booth's life who didn't want me, didn't care about me, and didn't see what I was worth. I had to convince myself I was worth something every day. Now I had a permanent reminder on my body, like a tattoo, a scar that I had gotten not through being _useless_ or a _smartmouth,_ but because I had been making a difference, solving murders and helping families. I had an injury that was never going to heal, an irreparable flaw that would always remind me of one of the most traumatizing incidents in my entire life, because I was trying to be a good person. And all Rebecca could do was hurt Booth because she didn't trust me with Parker and wouldn't talk about it with Booth or I like an adult.

I was the one most eager to get on with it and pretend I hadn't said anything, but Hodgins seemed unwilling to just flip the switch and let me continue to stay in an environment that clearly wasn't doing much for my mental state. Booth, however, was good at knowing when some things needed to not be addressed, saved for a later date. Of course he knew. He hadn't been stabbed by a dirty FBI agent, but he'd been tormented in the Middle East. No matter how compassionately he was asked, he wasn't going to start talking about that just because he was having a bad day.

"So Karen does the killing because she knows everyone will be suspecting Kyle," he theorized productively, brusquely changing the subject back to what it was supposed to be, coming up to the table on the other side.

Brennan followed his lead after a last uncertain glance she shared with Hodgins. I pretended not to feel either of them looking at me. "I'd prefer not to make any more assumptions," she told Booth correctively.

"Oh," he said, snorting.

Hodgins skeptically followed everyone else's direction. "There are particles in the knife marks," he reported his findings, leaning over the edge and holding his hand up, fist wrapped around an invisible knife. "When she was on the ground, the knife passed through the body and picked up sediments from the dirt." He stabbed down and lifted his arm again. "The next stab embedded that into the bone." He made a downwards motion again, then aborted the mimicked stab and lifted a rib bone with a big chip out of the top. "If I can get enough information from these particulates, I might be able to locate the site of the murder," he said optimistically.

Saroyan entered the bone room waving a sheet of paper. It made the flapping sound that never failed to make me want to send it through a shredder. "DNA results came back – it was Kyle under her nails."

"So he was there, too," Booth drew from that, pointing at her to elaborate.

I had no real reason to think that she wasn't going to correct him, but I was doing it first. _I have to stay in the game,_ I told myself. _I have to show I'm important to the cases._ "Not necessary. He had scratches on his arm, right? Epithelial cells can stay under the nails for a while." I held up my right hand and turned it so my palm was towards my face, showing Booth my fingernails. "That's why the hospital tried that when we were attacked in New Orleans." _We_ referred to Brennan and I, not Booth and I, but he knew that already.

"And he already admitted that he'd fought with her previously in the day," Brennan added, moving for a dismissal of those DNA results to the current likely scenario.

Saroyan coughed to get the attention back on her so she could finish what she'd come in to say. She flapped the paper again. "Fortunately, there was also the skin of somebody else." Booth looked at her as if asking why she didn't come out and say it. The responding stare almost made me snicker – he was the one who had interrupted her to pin Kyle at the crime scene. "Tests showed it was a woman."

Booth snapped his fingers. "Karen Tyler," he presumed, smiling as it came together.

Saroyan nodded her agreement. She'd come to the same conclusion. At least she'd moved on from Richardson. "We should get her DNA drawn as soon as possible," she advised. I held my chin a little higher and looked over to Brennan, but the anthropologist wasn't watching me. She was listening to Booth and Saroyan. I was just more satisfied that Saroyan was seeking out a case that fit physical evidence instead of the other way around.

"Smart," Booth complimented, smirking at her. I rolled my eyes and wished Angela had been wrong about their history. It was just weird to see him flirt. _That's one normal thing about my relationship with my parents, at least…_ That wasn't as uplifting as I had thought it might be. "Let's go, Bones, Mini."

"I'm still not miniature. You can't keep calling me that…"

* * *

Brennan and Booth took care of the interrogation of Karen Tyler when they brought her in. I could have been involved, but she was already watery-eyed and stuttering, so she wasn't the kind of interviewee I preferred. I liked the ones that were typically mean so that I could hit their buttons without the waterworks starting. She lawyered up before she was even in the building, and after about an hour of waiting, we had a Harvard graduate named Michael Jules toting around a briefcase and counseling her for a short time independently.

Sure enough, when I listened on the other side of the one-way mirror, her lip was wobbling before she was even accused of anything. Booth just asked a question about what she was doing with Carlie and Karen started trembling.

 _"_ _I-I didn't do it, I swear, I would never hurt her,"_ she promised, rambling. Her assurances meant very little in the investigation, but I wasn't sure I was sold.

 _"_ _Hmm."_ Booth looked at her cynically. _"And the other day, you said you and Kyle didn't know each other until after Carlie disappeared."_ He pulled out the chair directly across from the blonde woman, but Brennan didn't want to sit down. She stayed to the side of the room, watching the proceedings with her bag over her shoulder.

 _"_ _Because we both knew what everyone would think!"_ Karen tried to justify.

Jules looked down at the table and sighed softly. _"Karen, please don't say anything,"_ he advised wearily.

Booth hummed again and gestured to the Harvard guy. _"Even your lawyer thinks you did it,"_ he told Karen with a snort. Jules held his tongue, but his aggravation at the comment made him look up to the ceiling in a desperate attempt not to roll his eyes.

I looked down at my phone while Karen argued over whose advice to take: her lawyer's, or Booth's, who advised that full cooperation made things much smoother. I looked over the draft of a text message and reread it.

 _To: Rebecca Stinson_

 _Can we meet sometime? Preferably without Parker, definitely without Booth?_

My thumb hovered over the 'send' button. Just one press and I'd be being an adult. I didn't want to have that meeting any more than Rebecca probably did… but I owed it to Booth. He'd been so good to me and all he'd asked in return was that I not completely disappear off the grid. Now, because he was trying to look out for me, his ex was threatening to stop him from seeing his son. There was more to it, but the problem wouldn't even exist if I could just get through to Rebecca, convince her to concede to revert back to the old custody arrangement.

Although it probably wasn't the best time to be handling stressful personal problems while simultaneously trying to pay attention to an interrogation, I touched the 'send' button and watched the text disappear from the box, reappearing in a conversation bubble a second later.

Like most people we interviewed, Karen might as well have hired her lawyer for no reason, since she went against Jules' advisement. _"Kyle thought we should separate and meet up in a few months, so, you know, it wouldn't look so bad."_

 _"_ _Well, that didn't work out now, did it?"_ Booth smiled. Karen frowned and opened her mouth to object.

Brennan stepped up to the side of the table, holding up a Q-tip to take a DNA swab, and cut the woman off before she could object to Booth. _"Open your mouth,"_ she instructed coolly, as distanced from Karen as she could be while still being within reach to get the sample.

Karen bit the inside of her cheek, eyed the buccal swab kit Brennan was holding, and turned her head away from the anthropologist. _"Do I really have to do this?"_ She asked her lawyer.

 _"_ _They have a warrant,"_ he answered reluctantly, unable to stop the two associates from getting their sample.

 _"_ _When you were sleeping with Kyle, didn't it matter to you that you were destroying a family?"_ Brennan asked, quietly angry.

 _"_ _We were in love,"_ Karen replied defensively, glaring at the anthropologist while she unhappily crossed her arms and dropped her jaw, opening her mouth wide. Brennan leaned down over the table and pressed the cotton tip into the woman's mouth, swabbing the inside of her cheek.

Karen and I _both_ winced when Brennan's swabbing got unnecessarily aggressive. _"Ouch!"_ Karen yelled, pulling back.

 _"_ _Oops,"_ Brennan responded apologetically. Irritated, Jules looked at Booth, asking him with his eyes if the agent really condoned that. Brennan sounded like she was being about as truthful as a pathological liar. _"Sorry, I didn't realize you were in_ love. _Now it's a beautiful story."_

I checked my phone while snickering at Brennan. There was no responding answer from Rebecca. I told myself that it didn't necessarily mean anything. It hadn't been very long since I'd sent my message to her; she might not have seen it yet.

 _"_ _Kyle was going to tell her,"_ Karen huffily retorted at Brennan, less tearful and more indignant now that she'd been attacked with a Q-tip. Brennan dropped the Q-tip in to a sterile, marked vial and screwed the top on for Saroyan. _"We were going to be honest."_

Booth sardonically added, _"Because, you know, you do that so well."_

Flustered, Karen looked from Brennan to Booth, unable to combat both of them coming after her for her actions at the same time. _"I would never hurt her,"_ she reiterated, sounding like a broken record. She swallowed. _"And neither would Kyle!"_

 _"_ _Kyle. Right. The love of your life, who no one has seen for two days."_ Brennan held Karen in contempt and looked over to Booth. _"Can you see why I'm leery of relationships?"_ She asked him agitatedly, holding the vial with the DNA sample in a worryingly tight fist.

That was one interrogation that I was actually glad that I had stayed out of. I wasn't sure I'd want to be on Brennan's bad side by saying something wrong, lest I got jabbed in the mouth, too.

* * *

When Hodgins found something out about a case, he got excited. When he found something too exciting for him to text, he called on the phone, and sometimes he talked so quickly he needed to be reminded to slow down and to use laymen's terms. When he called, talking quickly with long entomological words and sentences hard to distinguish from each other, Brennan, Booth, and I all went up to Angela's office to meet the two of them. Some of his excitement transferred to us, so we hurried to find out what he must've found.

"We hit pay dirt!" He and Angela were at a big computer monitor with a large map of New Jersey on the screen. "Actually, we hit silt containing the feces of the gypsy moth, some quartz, and mica. That and the zinc levels in the dinoflagellates from the freshwater, as well as the pinaceae pollen…" Booth started nodding his head impatiently, waiting for Hodgins to get through the scientific terms and make his point. "… Led us to a patch of pitch pines outside of Gloucester City, New Jersey."

Angela emphasized a yellow dot on the map, a very small circle. Half was over green land, and half was over a small body of water that looked like it represented a stream. "She was killed right here."

Brennan looked at Booth in question, then to Angela again for answers. "Then when did they move her to the bay?"

"They didn't," she said, pointing out the line of water and zooming in. The line moved on. "They left her in New Jersey in the Rancocas Creek." The creek ran towards a larger water body that eventually met with the nearby bay where she'd been found. "She made it to the bay on her own."

"What, did she take the shuttle?" Booth asked sarcastically.

"It's getting all _Walking Dead_ in here," I warned, wiggling my eyebrows.

"Basically," Angela smiled. "Two days after Carlie disappeared, there were thunderstorms in central New Jersey. Heavy, heavy rains. The body must have been flushed down the Rancocas and into the Delaware River." The yellow dot that illustrated the crime scene where she was killed went down the thin stream, joined the broader river representation, and followed downstream. "Then, she slowly made her way down the Delaware and into the bay."

"The movement and the battering on the rocks loosened her weight, so she floated to the surface and washed ashore," Brennan explained to Booth, which gave an answer to the question of how the body had stayed hidden for so long.

Booth smirked at the results showed on Angela's computer. "I'm pretty sure Karen didn't see that coming."

* * *

The first time we'd investigated water, I'd gotten to suit up and go diving. This time, the FBI was a little more impatient, and because we'd had to travel a short way to get to the site, Booth had enlisted FBI teams who were closer to the location to collect samples. I was the first to admit that I was no entomologist or botanist, and Hodgins' credentials were insanely out of my league, but he seemed to enjoy having me around to tutor, so I stayed by his lab equipment, set up on a collapsible table. The equipment was sparser than it would be once we were back at the lab, and several of the pieces were cheaper or older versions than the ones he had in the Jeffersonian.

I sealed the vial on some water after Hodgins took a sample for observation on a microscope, put it in an airtight evidence bag, and marked it with a Sharpie while the scientist looked at it through the lenses. Booth walked between people, eager to leave. For someone who claimed to dislike the lab, he wasn't too happy outside of it, either. Everything about this case was bothering him in one way or another. If he wasn't beating himself up for letting Richardson walk from charges when the victim originally went missing, then he was feeling guilty about assigning the blame to someone who may not be responsible. If neither of those were the issue, then he felt bad that Carlie's parents had no answers while he waited around for his consultants to give him results.

"Are you _sure_ this is it?" Booth asked, pacing back to us.

Hodgins looked up from his lenses but kept a hand on a magnification dial to the right of the microscope. "Zinc, mica-"

"We got the list the first time around," I interrupted, seeing the expression on Booth's face and recognizing it. It was rarely directed towards me, but I made a point of watching other people's behavior, and Booth made that face fairly often at the lab when he got annoyed by things going over his head. I didn't pity Booth, exactly, but I did feel bad for him, and didn't think he needed any extra stress. As if the personal feelings tied to the murder case weren't enough, he had Rebecca threatening to separate him from his son.

 _I have seriously got to do something about that, and soon, too._

Hodgins pouted up at me from his foldable chair and slumped forwards, shoulders falling. "You're supposed to be the fun one, Princess," he complained.

My eyes rolled on habit. I halfheartedly protested, "Don't call me Princess."

I had never appreciated the sentiment no matter who it came from, so it surprised me that I wasn't irritated when it came from Hodgins. I supposed that it had a great deal to do with how it was an inside joke. He called me a princess after Xena because of positive memories that had been true to my character, not after some Disney movie or a stereotype. I had a definite soft spot for everyone on the team, though Hodgins' was the one that surprised me the most, aside from Booth's. Obviously I had some weird feelings for Booth. Hostility had given way to concern and empathy, which had deepened into some… something, which I didn't have a word for but was more than I'd felt for anyone else before. Hodgins, though – Hodgins had played parts in the many incidents in which the team rescued me from bad situations, but especially since I hadn't spent very much time one-on-one with him before being stabbed, it shocked me to stop and consider how close I felt to him.

He looked up at Booth with his eyes narrowed. The sun wasn't directly behind Booth, but it was angled in such a way that there was a glare being sent into Hodgins' and my face. "In short, this is definitely the right place." He put his hands on his hips and looked past Booth to the small, dirty beach. "And it's beautiful," he admired.

Rancocas Creek was… well, a creek, obviously, so it wasn't the prettiest place in the world. Humans had left trash, rain had left mud that clung to shoes and made icky squelching noises, and the water was colored some mix of dirty dark blue and pale green from algae and moss. Still, we were far enough from civilization for the place to be tranquil. There weren't buildings, there wasn't a ton of loud noise, and there wouldn't be cars if it weren't for it becoming our crime scene. It would be a nice place to go fishing or camping.

Booth looked down at Hodgins and turned his nose up at the sentiment. "Yeah, because, you know, _that's_ important for a murder." I rolled my eyes again. I wasn't exactly keen on the idea of being murdered, but it had almost happened before, and I'd rather be almost-murdered at the beach than in an old, dark warehouse. Having been in the latter position, I felt qualified to comment on the desirability of murder sites.

"Agent Booth!" Hodgins, Booth, and I all looked to see who it was. The male voice wasn't one any of us recognized, and it turned out to belong to one of Booth's agents, not our squints. He had on a windbreaker and FBI baseball cap. The sleeves were too big for his arms and made him look even thinner. He was knelt down with gloves over his hands, brushing at the ground. "Over here!"

The three of us, as well as Brennan, who had been nearby enough to hear the summons, went to investigate. The younger FBI agent moved out of the way so that we could check it out. I got a closer look at him. Freckles dusted his face, his eyes were a sort of pale green, and his strawberry-blond hair stuck out from under his hat. He had to be eight to ten years older than me, yet he still moved out of the way when I was the first one to jog over. It still boggled my mind – I was so sorely out of place, yet still given the respect of any of the Jeffersonian employees. Well, I suppose I was still an employee, but I had a hugely different educational background that pretty much everyone knew about, thanks to my popularity.

A little faux leather suitcase was half-buried in the ground several yards away from the shoreline. The brown was peeling back and cracking, and a yellow residue was left around the edges by the lock where adhesive had dried out. Fabric embellishments were held to the front, colors muted with age and edges frayed from abuse, but they still clung determinedly to the case. I had gloves on already from handling evidence with Hodgins, so I reached to the back of the suitcase, dislodged it from the wet and crusty sand, and moved it out of the depression it had made.

"Look at that," Booth remarked over my shoulder, walking around to my left side. Brennan came to look down from the other direction while Hodgins stood between Booth and I and checked it out from behind us. "C.R. – Carlie Richardson's initials."

I observed the front. The silver lining around the opening of the case was old, dinged up, and rusted. I highly doubted the suitcase had been worth very much. There was a clasp lock that turned up, hooked a piece of metal over a notch, and then forced pressure onto it to stay closed. The lock was rusted browns and coppers. I wouldn't have dared touch it if I hadn't already gotten tetanus boosters.

"There's a lock, but it's all rusted." I smacked the bottom of the lock lightly. The pressure from the metal hook flipped the switch up and as the lock changed position, flakes of rust and peeled paint came flying off. The suitcase was easily opened after that.

Even though I had held my breath preemptively, I was still nearly overpowered by the odor. The suitcase wasn't waterproof or airtight, so even though it had presumably been closed tightly for the last year, there was still dirty fabric, congealing hygienic products, and lotions whose tops hadn't been screwed on tight enough that had since started to break down into liquids and cloying, clumpy goo.

I covered my nose with my wrist where the glove ended.

"You don't pack face cream and a night gown if you're being abducted," Brennan pointed out, looking over my crouching figure to Booth.

Hodgins' footsteps moved and his voice changed as if he was looking backwards. The road we'd taken to transport ourselves and our miniature lab to the banks had been rough and gravelly, passing hiking trails, campsites, and older temporary lodgings.

"A lot of vacation cabins nearby," he contemplated. "If she was upset, this would be a good place to unwind."

"Karen Tyler said that she liked Carlie. She could have befriended her to lure her up here." Booth pushed his hands into his pockets. I slowly closed the top of the suitcase, mostly so that a sudden shutting motion wouldn't sent a huge whoosh of stale air at my face. "Maybe Carlie's friends knew that she and Karen were getting chummy."

* * *

I thought it seemed kind of weird that they were at the same park at the same time every day, but it couldn't hurt the kids to have a routine, and I didn't know what their schedules looked like, so I didn't say anything. The toddlers were happy enough and no one was getting hurt, and it was convenient for us in that it was easy to seek them out.

Booth gave Mary and Tina both the photograph from the Campbells. Mary was the one of the two who didn't have her child in her arms, as Tina's was asleep with his head against her shoulder, so she took the image and held it so both of her friends could see.

"Did Carlie know her?" Brennan asked, the three of us standing in an uneven line.

Mary frowned at the picture uncertainly, not knowing why it was important or what made it the subject of more questions from the FBI. "I thought they'd just started going out," she said, handing it back, looking sorry that she couldn't say anything else.

"No," Booth denied, storing it in his wallet so that he could return it to Carlie's parents. It had Karen in it, but it also featured their dead daughter. "They knew each other from before."

Tina scowled. "Bastard," she accused quietly, fuming at Kyle.

Mary touched her friend's shoulder that wasn't occupied by a tired little baby. "Carlie knew Kyle was cheating on her, that's why they were fighting," she said with an amazed and sad note of realization.

"And why she didn't want the baby," Faith sighed, looking over to the sandbox where one of the kids was playing. Tina's kid had blonde hair like Mary's, and those two were harder to tell apart (babies looked like each other, no matter what infatuated parents said), but Faith's was not only female, but set apart by her darker skin.

I raised my eyebrows. This was the first I was hearing about any sort of resentment for her pregnancy. "Did she say that specifically?" I asked, attempting to discern the truth from an exaggerated recollection.

"Yeah," Faith said emphatically, nodding her head sharply. "She was really upset at the time, but I don't care _what's_ happening. To say you don't want your child when you're getting ready to give birth? It's not right."

I thought that was kind of narrow-minded. Obviously you shouldn't say something like that to your child, but it wasn't like Carlie's baby had been out of the womb to hear it said, much less been cognizant of the meaning of the words. Any woman was entitled to feel however they liked about their bodies and their situations when they were pregnant (and at any other time). Plenty of women got pregnant when they didn't want to be, expressed that regardless of how far along they were, but took care of their children anyway because they were responsible people. Assuming that Carlie would either fail to ensure her child's best options growing up, or taking away her right to her emotions regarding her life's changes, was closed-minded and heavily biased on Faith's own feelings about being a mother.

"A lot of things aren't right," I reminded her. The world wasn't black and white. I liked punching people, but that didn't make it right. It also didn't mean that I was going to impulsively hit everyone I felt like smacking. "But given the circumstances, I have to ask: is there any chance the baby was conceived non-consensually?"

I winced as I asked. I couldn't even imagine being raped and or coerced and then left with that permanent effect. I definitely wouldn't want a baby under those circumstances, even if I was an avid fan of children.

Faith's eyes softened and she shook her head. "No way," she promised, sounding completely convinced. "She was so happy when she found out. It was just later that she…" She trailed off. Carlie's marriage got rougher and she got more troubled. A baby added to the complications, so it made sense that Carlie hadn't been thrilled about it twenty-four seven.

Mary bit her tongue. "You know, I think I _did_ see that woman," she remembered in surprise, making a vague pointing motion at Booth's pocket where he had shoved the wallet and photograph. "I was driving home from work, they were in front of a Starbucks. I'm not sure if it was the _day_ she disappeared, but I'm pretty sure it was around the same time."

Booth raised a hand to her gratefully. "Thanks."

If Karen and Carlie had been seen talking to each other before she disappeared, then it only looked that much worse for Karen Tyler. I wasn't a big fan of Richardson, going off of what I was hearing about him and his treatment of his late wife, but I hoped he would turn up sooner or later. I didn't want to be finding more people dead.

One of the children started wailing. It was coming from Mary's toddler, sitting with his bowed legs spread in the sandbox, clothes covered in grainy sand with a bright red toy truck in front of him. The kid stuffed his fist in his mouth after grabbing up a handful of sand, getting even more caught in the creases of his shirt. His face was red and teary.

"Your kid's eating sand," Brennan stated warningly to Mary, who made an alarmed face and went scrambling to go stop her child from poisoning himself.

* * *

Brennan didn't last very long in her discontent quietness before she started to complain out loud. "I don't know how they can do it," she admitted, frustrated with herself for not understanding and with them for not making sense.

"They're self-obsessed," Booth told her in explanation, hands tight on the steering wheel and tone firm. "They have no conscience."

Brennan turned her head to look at him, her eyes a little wider in surprise. I frowned while I watched them go back and forth. She seemed surprised that he'd taken it that far. I wasn't even sure what they were talking _about,_ because Brennan's brain worked very quickly and she and Booth weren't always on the same page. Hell, there were a few times even I hadn't been able to keep up.

"I don't know," she said uncertainly, not positive she wanted to attribute such terrible qualities to them.

Now that Brennan had started him on it, Booth couldn't stop. "They destroy anything that gets in their way," he swore. "They're not even human."

Brennan leaned towards the window and shuffled her body around to face Booth. I chuckled and received Booth's questioning eyebrows in the rearview mirror. "I don't think you're talking about the same things," I snorted into my hand.

"The mothers?" Brennan offered what she'd been referring to.

A shocked and disbelieving Booth took his eyes off of the road to stare at her, aghast. "Huh?"

"I was talking about the mothers," she elaborated awkwardly.

"I'm talking about the _killers!"_

Yep, there had definitely been a bit of confusion. Glad as I was that it was under control, I also kind of wished it had continued longer. It would've been interesting to see what they'd have said if one was talking about parents and the other murderers, especially what they said in reaction to the other's stance.

Both puzzled me, sometimes. I wasn't sure what it was about mothers that bothered Brennan so much, but at least killers made sense most of the time. Motivations for committing murder are generally straightforward, if irrational. Parenting is much more complex, especially because, unlike pulling a trigger, having a child is _not_ just a one-and-done deal.

"Killers are understandable," I remarked from the back, looking down to my fingers and picking at my cuticles. Around other people, I'd have hesitated to say such a thing, but they must've understood what I meant. "Sometimes. When they're not like Epps," I added. Even Kenton had had motives that made sense, even if they were highly objectionable. Epps just did it for fun, because he liked it, because it got him off to bludgeon young women to death.

The anthropologist shook her head, soft curtain of brown hair unsettling and catching on the loose shoulder of her jacket. "I just don't know how mothers can do it," she scowled at the dash. She didn't like not understanding something. "I mean, dogs can be trained in a couple of weeks." I covered my mouth and snickered. _Comparing kids to dogs… nice._ "With kids, mothers have to give up their lives for _years._ "

 _Unless they don't keep the kids,_ I thought privately. The smirk fell off of my face and I dropped both hands down to my lap, looking at my thighs somberly. _My_ mother sure hadn't given up much to have me.

"No. When you're looking at your kid, you don't feel like you're giving up anything." Booth shook his head, chancing a longer look at Brennan and reaching for her hand as he slowed the car. He touched the back of her hand before the light changed back to green abruptly and he hurried to get moving again.

I cocked my head. I knew he adored Parker, but was Parker the only one that applied to? He may not have planned on Rebecca getting pregnant – neither of them had – but he'd had nine months to prepare himself, and then he'd _chosen_ to stick around. With me, I was suddenly thrown at him. Even when he first met me, he didn't have a choice about looking after me, thanks to Cullen deciding I needed a babysitter.

In my head, I tried to make a list of things he'd ever done for me. He went out of his way for me – traveling to New Mexico, then to New Orleans, taking cases he might not have normally because I asked him to. He was having strains with Rebecca because he wanted me to be involved in his and Parker's lives. Surely there was more than that? Not a ton was obvious, but there had to be more that I didn't see. There had to be things that were primarily mental, not physical or materialistic.

Brennan considered this and asked a follow-up question to measure the validity. "So you would do it again?"

"What?"

"You'd have Parker again, even with everything you're going through?"

At first, he just seemed shocked, as though Brennan had asked something completely incomprehensible. Then he realized that he was hearing her correctly, and he reeled back as much as he could in a seat, the belt across his chest slackening. "What kind of question is that?!"

"Wouldn't it be easier if Parker wasn't caught in the middle of this drama of yours with Rebecca and the new boyfriend?" She questioned reasonably. I nodded slightly from where I sat, yet kept my mouth shut. That was one line I didn't want to cross with Booth.

"God, no," he whispered, horrified. He sounded like he'd been physically hit in the gut. "No, Bones, no. He's my _son._ Whatever we're going through, it's not about him. He _knows_ that."

Unsatisfied, and maybe a little concerned for Parker, Brennan crossed her arms and looked out the passenger window. "That's what parents say when they want to justify themselves," she debated quietly.

Normally, I'd have been inclined to agree, but I knew Booth, I had a pretty good idea of how Rebecca sized up as a mom, and I had been around Parker when he reacted to both of his parents. Parker was too little to disguise how he felt, and there were no pretenses between he and his parents. Either he was oblivious (which I doubted, because for a four-year-old, he was surprisingly observant) or he was assured that his mom and dad would take care of it soon.

Booth took it as a jab. It might have been – Brennan had always been a little sensitive to the topic of parenting, especially when negligence was a concern. Booth exhaled deeply to keep himself from responding with the knee-jerk answer and targeted what he knew she was thinking.

"You know, I haven't walked out on Parker, alright? I would _never_ have done what your parents did," the agent vowed. He then seemed to remember that he had more than one child (not that I cared whether or not I was included in the conversation – Booth hadn't had the option of raising me, and we'd all established that my foster families were complete garbage; a little neglect was way below the usual paygrade). "If I'd known Holly was mine," he started, voice to Brennan but eyes locked on me through the mirror. I could feel his stare at my hair where my head was bent to look at my legs. "I'd have never let her in the system to begin with. _Ever,_ you hear?"

The distress in his voice bugged me. Exactly why was he upset now? Still about Parker's part in the discussion? The fact that I'd been in the foster system? That he'd been deprived of the decision to be my dad? That the idea he would leave his baby in foster care was even a consideration? If anyone was going to be upset, I still thought I should be the one who sounded angry. Booth obviously had a right to be mad and sad and all those other things, but I was the one who had really _suffered_ from it.

Even as I thought those things, I clenched my teeth and glared at my shoes. Did I make sense? Would anyone else agree that my abuse was worse than Booth's choice being taken away? I was definitely never going to be like the majority of people, let alone the majority of people in my age group, and I was probably going to always struggle with interpersonal relationships of all kinds – platonic, romantic, familial, and, possibly in the future, sexual. How was I supposed to even have _that_ kind of relationship, which society markets as vital to growing up, if I couldn't manage to tolerate someone touching my face?

These things had never used to bother me until the Jeffersonian team took me in, and while I knew it was wrong and illogical and ungrateful, a small, dark voice in my mind was furious with them. I'd been miserable, but at least I hadn't ever felt like I was completely screwed up. Before I'd had people to demonstrate healthy relationships and prove to me that they were good things to have, I hadn't been concerned with future relationships I may have to look forward to, nor my inadequacy and unpreparedness to build them.

"Look, this is almost exactly like the argument you had when Donovan Decker was kidnapped," I told them both, a little brisk with my words. I kind of regretted sounding harsh, but I just wanted to change the subject. It was sending me down a dark path I didn't want to get lost on – not when I had other things to worry about, including Parker and Rebecca. "No one's questioning that you love Parker, okay? But Dr. Brennan has the point that it must be stressful. Now, _you,_ you think it's worth the stress to have your son. And that's an understandable thought. Dr. Brennan just doesn't see the point in inducing all of the stress, and maybe it's because she doesn't have a child, maybe it's because she thinks about it differently, maybe it's a mix of both. And how we grow up influences how we make decisions."

I should've cut myself off then. Everyone in the car knew fully well how my decisions would have been influenced.

"… Being a kid sucked so much for me that I don't get joy out of the thought of having my own," I murmured quietly over the air conditioner. Both adults had gone silent to let me speak and to mull over my succinctly-stated mediation. "And that's okay," I coached calmly. If I couldn't be at peace with myself and my approach to life, then they deserved to be. "Because all of our experiences are valid, and we are all entitled to our own desires." I paused, blinked, and shifted my legs, knocking my knees and pushing my thighs together while spreading my feet further apart. I leaned forwards on my legs to look between the front seats. "Can we just not fight about _this_ , of all things?"

* * *

 **A/N: Well. Yikes.**

 **I'm going to try to keep this brief because I know I don't really like long A/N's, but basically, this is what happened: college, other projects demanded my attention, and my email screwed up and stopped letting me know when I was getting reads/favorites/reviews, and I only just realized it was odd that I hadn't gotten any a couple of days ago.**

 **I've realized that it'll be hard to commit to an update schedule on this story while I'm having trouble picking up the swing of it again. That said, I do intend to keep working on it when I get the chance, and there definitely shouldn't be any more two-month gaps in updates!**

 **Speaking of updates, update on my work: this is an in-progress story, I'm publishing a new White Collar story tomorrow (Nov. 25, 2016) which is already almost entirely written, I'm working to get in gear and finish up "Supernatural," and I have "Far From Home" and "I Need a Hero" in progress and unpublished, which are based on BBC Sherlock and The Avengers respectively. For more info, these things are expressed in more detail on my page.**


	10. Mother and Child in the Bay, Part Five

The three of us – the old, classic field team – were speculating in Brennan's office, killing time more than anything, because Booth wasn't quite over Brennan's misunderstood remark on Parker and whether or not it would be easier if he had just never been born. It was kind of awkward, but luckily for me, I was getting more and more used to the sometimes uncomfortable role I had to play in being in the middle of their arguments. I kept them from killing each other and they could vent at me, and most of the time I didn't have to counsel them unless they were being particularly stubborn.

Saroyan interrupted, as was becoming pretty par for the course where she was concerned. I threw a glare at her when I saw her shadow and knew she'd entered the room without knocking. She had her hand out in a fist like she'd been about to, but then passed right into the open doorway without any further consideration.

"It's not Karen Tyler," she announced, eyes landing swiftly on Booth.

The agent sat up straight from where he had been sinking as far into the couch as he could. "What?" He asked, pushing himself upright and looking over the back of the furniture.

I only gave her my attention because she was talking about something relevant to the case that I was also supposed to be involved in. Brennan looked miffed, but observed from where she leaned back in her chair for the same reason.

"The DNA from under Carlie's fingernails doesn't match. And something else is weird," she warned. I rolled my eyes, although, for once, it wasn't because of her. Why were we always _surprised_ when weird things happened anymore? It was like when I'd started questioning why we were surprised when we found out we'd been lied to. The murderers had lied to us. What had we _expected_ them to do? Make a full confession? Weird was not strange, it was the normal for this lab. Everything was relative. Unless Saroyan had found evidence that suggested lycanthropy or experimental genetic mutation, nothing was as weird as "something else is weird" led one to believe. "Tissue from the fetus shows evidence of escitalopram."

Having had plenty of issues with the illness that utilized the properties of that compound, I recognized it easily enough. "An antidepressant," I said, for Booth to keep up.

Saroyan blinked and looked at me. Had she just not expected me to answer? Maybe she was still of the opinion that I was more decorative than intelligent. "Right," she said, audibly surprised that I had been able to accurately answer.

"It's not _that_ weird," Brennan unknowingly agreed with me. "Carlie Richardson was having emotional problems with her husband."

"Carlie Richardson _wasn't_ taking the drug," Saroyan contradicted, shaking her head.

Booth had gotten a lot better at keeping up with the science speech, even though I still served as a translator pretty frequently. His only problem this time was that he assumed there was a logical explanation that he was missing, when really the rest of us didn't have any answers to fill in his blanks, either. "Hold on," he protested. "None of this is making any sense."

"I agree," the pathologist said, which just made Booth lean back and groan as the situation complicated itself. "The only way the fetus could have the drug in its system is if it were passed from the mother in utero."

"Or through breast milk," Brennan amended, and then her eyes widened as she realized the implications in what she'd just said without thinking.

For the kid to have gotten a chemical through breastfeeding, it would have had to be out of the womb, which meant that it was feasible that it had ingested or been injected with the drug in some other way, but more importantly, it was a feasible explanation that contradicted the working theory that the bones of the infant had actually been inside Carlie at the time when she was murdered.

"How do you breastfeed an unborn child?" Booth looked disgruntled.

"You don't," I informed flatly. "There is no way that that child could have had a chemical that Carlie didn't, unless it was no longer in her uterus."

Brennan pushed with her hands away from the desk, spinning her chair to free her legs from underneath. She jumped up and took to flight, running past the bewildered pathologist who watched her leave. I watched her run for about three seconds before I thought tiredly, _here we go again,_ and picked myself up from the sofa that I was on and started walking more calmly after her.

"Zach!" She called out, yelling for her grad student.

"Whoa…" Booth complained as he stood up too quickly with the intention of pursuit, only to stumble from a head rush.

* * *

"An infant's skull is made up of several separate bones that are eventually fused together." Brennan carefully settled gloved fingers underneath the edges of the tray holding the constructed skull of Carlie's baby and lifted it off of the table, closer to her eye-level, and beckoned Zach over to her side. I looked over Zach's shoulder. Saroyan, with her high heels, looked between Brennan and Zach. Booth was the only one to stand to the side, not knowing what he was looking for.

"How did we not notice that before?" I asked indignantly. This was just sad. We called ourselves anthropologists but we didn't see something like _that?_ That was a big deal. That was huge. We should know the facts independently and be able to make the connection, not have to have them handed to us taped together.

"Oh my God," Zach breathed, stunned, probably by the same thing as I was – our own incompetency. Jeez. We should turn in our "smart people" cards, because obviously they've expired. I can tell apart the bones of a fetus and the bones of an adult, but I can't notice when bones aren't positioned the way they should be?

"I don't believe it," Saroyan decided to say, her face conflicted between aggravation and horror.

"Yeah," Brennan agreed, nodding herself like she'd been smacked in the face with it as much as the rest of us had been.

Well, the rest of us but Booth, that is. He huffed and cleared his throat loudly to get attention back. "Okay, now everybody knows but me," he declared, obviously aggravated by this fact.

I rolled my eyes at his impatience and stepped away from Zach. "The reason kids have more bones than adults is because during infancy and adolescence, certain bones overlap and fuse together," I started to explain in the terms that he would understand. I couldn't just say "go look at the skull" and expect him to figure it out – hell, especially not when it took the rest of us supposed forensic scientists to notice. "It's why infants' heads need special support – there are soft spots in their skulls where the bones haven't fused. In a fetus, you'd expect for there to be little or no signs of fusion, but in this skull, they've already started to overlap." The spaces between the cranial bones were narrower than they should be, and some, although they weren't completely fused, had begun to just barely touch.

"The skull bones have shifted because this child was born _alive._ " Brennan looked at the top of the cranium from another angle, the inside of her right cheek sucking in as she bit the inside of her mouth. "He lived probably about two weeks," she estimated.

Booth alternated between looking at me and Brennan, expecting someone to explain the inconsistency. "But Carlie was pregnant when she was last seen," he reminded us, as if we hadn't read the missing persons' report half a dozen times each.

This part was much easier to put together than the bones were. "So that means…?" I said to prompt him. There was really only one solution, wasn't there? It was physically impossible for the child in our lab to be the biological child of Carlie Richardson.

"That means… what?" He looked at me blankly. I sighed.

"Either she went through a time warp," I said sassily, "Or this isn't Carlie's child." Losing the attitude, I looked mournfully at the tiny little body lain out on the backlit table. How someone so small could become a victim in one of our violent and brutal cases was beyond me. Who looks at a baby and thinks _ah I'm so disturbed and angered by this tiny little infant that I'm going to kill it_?! "The antidepressants came from breast milk, which the baby got from its mother."

"Then… what happened to _her_ baby?" Saroyan inquired, looking like she was actually sick to her stomach. For once, we were on the same page – this was a horrific discovery.

Zach was still looking down thoughtfully, but then he jerked his head up quickly, eyes brightening. "The stab wounds on her lower ribs!" He answered, at first satisfied at solving the puzzle presented, but then looking disturbed by the implications he'd just laid out in front of himself.

Making an abhorred face, Brennan gingerly replaced the tray with the skull back onto the table, pushing it forward securely. "The baby was… _cut_ out of her, and _stolen."_ And people wondered why I didn't want to have kids. Would anyone, after being a part of this horror movie? "This child replaced it." Brennan looked to the bones and grieved quietly for the baby's sake. I could have, but I chose to feel anger instead. Whoever decided to kill a child and kill an adult for the sake of having another child that they could kill was going to have some serious hell coming their way.

* * *

We took the bones to the storage exam room and placed them underneath a magnifying lens. The bone had some maroon and dark brown-colored stains from bleeding. "This child was dead before Carlie was murdered. You can see the traces of blood pooling in the cranium," Brennan pointed out one of the largest spots with the tip of her white-gloved pointer finger.

"Abusive head trauma," Zach concluded, his face falling.

"Evidence of shaken baby syndrome." Saroyan covered her face, looking down at the edge of the table in grief. Normally I would have been reluctant to be too close to Saroyan, but she was putting our difficulties aside to mourn the little life that was taken away. Sometimes she did things to remind me she was human. That was one of those times.

Booth turned away from the monitor, no longer able to look. "Oh, God." Knowing what the marks meant made it too hard for him to see.

Angela, despite being insistent that Hodgins was the overly-touchy one between them, had moved closer to the entomologist when I checked on her. "You said the little guy was only two weeks old," she asked sorrowfully, shaking her head at the tiny little partial skeleton.

"The antidepressants were probably for postpartum depression," I figured quietly. That explained why they'd been in the baby. The mother who'd been breastfeeding him had been having mental instability after her pregnancy ended, making her even more volatile.

"She got upset with the baby," Saroyan theorized dully. "Crying the most common cause… and she shook him to quiet him down."

I took over when she went quiet, for once working seemingly in sync. "Except you're never supposed to shake a baby, because they're too fragile. The veins between the brain and skull are weak enough to detach. Blood is released into the cranium and the brain swells from concussion-"

"Okay!" Booth snapped, holding up a hand and cutting me off. Being yelled at by a male voice always gave me a jolt of energy, but this time the twisting in my stomach just took it in stride. I was already feeling pretty terrible. I closed my mouth and regretted elaborating. It was important for the prosecution. Not for telling someone who would never be able to consider a murdered child without thinking of his own. Booth realized quickly that he had shouted at someone who really didn't like being shouted at and lowered his voice. "I get it. So what you're saying is that the mother kills her own son and replaces him with Carlie's."

"Fits the pattern," Saroyan nodded. It was weird that we were working together well, and now, of all times. It would be reasonable that we clashed the most when there was more emotion involved. There were more opinions to be had and emotions to feel. Saroyan seemed humanized when she proved to me that we could have the same empathies when things got serious. "She feels the guilt at what she's done and needs to make it right, prove to herself that she's still a good mother. So she takes Carlie's child and makes it her own. It's only been two weeks, not many people have seen her kid. Who would know?"

 _Not many._ Especially in the first few months, when a baby's face looked the most generalized. If it did look a little different, everyone would reason it away; it was just an effect of the colors he wore or the mood he was in.

"But the stab wounds?" Booth asked with a scowl.

"All of Carlie's stab wounds are to the upper part of the body," Brennan reminded. "The killer was careful not to hit close to the uterus because she wanted the baby alive." The more we learned, the more it seemed like Carlie had died for the sole purpose of stealing her kid. What a twisted crime. Her killer needed a lot more than just some mild postpartum meds.

Saroyan blinked and indicated Brennan. "Your report indicates there were knife marks in the lower ribs?"

"They seem to be made by whatever instrument was used to remove the child after Carlie was dead," she said, similarly low on energy and enthusiasm. Brennan's posture was downtrodden, her tone upset, and her face pulled into a very frustrated mask of anger and disgust.

We all looked over at Zach to see if he had any further knowledge on what could have made the vicious injuries that had been left behind. He didn't miss his cue. "I'm working on it," he promised, although seemed disappointed with himself that he wasn't able to produce a conclusive summary on the likely murder weapon.

Brennan held the cranium with the care that she might have used to cradle an _actual_ baby, were it still alive. The side of her cheek was sucked in and chewed on her tongue. "We _might_ be able to use the infant's most prominent genetic characteristics to see similarities with the mother," she said optimistically, though she looked skeptical herself. "Ange, can you input the information from the infant's skull to give us a face?"

Looking as though she'd been asked to make some macabre piece of art, Angela nodded, her face still a flushed, sickened color. "Sure…"

When a ringing phone interrupted the tense and respectfully distraught lull between any words, Booth whipped out his cell like he'd been praying for an escape. Hodgins had his mouth covered and couldn't look at what remained of the baby. Angela conversely appeared abhorred and unable to look away.

"Booth… Yeah. Right away." He hung up before anyone would have had the chance to answer him, taking only one line into consideration. It was important enough to him to encourage a fast exit. Or maybe it was just the escape route he'd been waiting for to leave a room he clearly wasn't enjoying being in. "They found Kyle Richardson," he told me, seeking out Brennan and gazing at her until she looked up from the bloodstained bones.

* * *

"I wonder if he'll even care, you know? Finding out that his wife is dead." Booth smacked the heel of his right hand on the top curve of the steering wheel, turning to look out the window of his door.

"He didn't kill her," Brennan reminded him, barely looking up from her phone.

"No," Booth agreed, "But he ran." He scoffed in disbelief and tossed his head. I thought it was nice that it was so appalling to him, but it was also a little hurtful – not in that it was offensive or made me feel bad, but it made me feel even worse for myself because, of the people who could've had a say in my life, the one person who would've made considerate choices for my sake had been refused the right. "How do you just cut your family out of your life like that?"

 _Do you even realize who you're in the car with?_ Although I couldn't really be mad at Nick or Rosie Kirkland anymore (since they disappeared when they were murdered, I figure they have an acceptable excuse), I still had plenty mixed emotions for Aaron, and that didn't even delve into the issues with my biological mother and maternal relatives. Sitting right next to him was a woman who similarly grew up with less-than-stellar role models, because her parents had up and disappeared from her life, her mother murdered by a former hitman. Her brother and she had reconnected, but she had fifteen years of bitterness and damage done by his abandonment.

"You should find a way to ask our parents," I told him snidely, crossing my arms. Sometimes he just didn't _think_ before he spoke, and though usually it was harmless, there were some times when I really wish he would've just kept his mouth shut.

There was a long and tense silence in the car after that, and I knew without a doubt that it was my fault. I didn't doubt he would've been reminded of his company by Brennan if I hadn't, but there would've been more tactful ways of doing it.

For once, Brennan was the one trying to be the mediator. It was weird to have switched places with her, but it wasn't a _bad_ change. Sometimes it got exhausting to always stow my issues to focus on helping alleviate theirs. I never complained, so that distress was mostly my fault, but it was still a nice feeling to be allowed to express myself and have someone else caring.

"Well, what about Abraham?" The novelist offered thoughtfully. Her voice sounded open and caring, but slightly unsure.

 _Who's Abraham?_ Had I missed an entire chapter of our investigation somehow?

Booth picked up his free hand and tossed it up by his face while the car accelerated. "What, you're going to throw religion in my face right now?" He complained.

 _Oh. That Abraham._

Brennan leaned towards the window and looked a little disappointed. "I thought you found answers in what you believe," she justified. I sent a look at Booth in the rearview mirror that he didn't see. She hardly ever meant to attack his beliefs; I was the one that had done that, honestly. I repeatedly insisted Jesus was a zombie at one point, but even that had only been to get him to stop bullying the people in New Orleans who believed in voodoo. How could he not realize by now that we didn't ever meant to take shots at his religion just for the sake of being mean?

"Well, I mean…" He backpedaled when he looked to his side and saw the expression on her face. It was somewhere between hurt and indignation. "That's just one Bible story that I just don't like. I mean, God commands Abraham to kill his own son, and so he does."

"No," Brennan firmly corrected. "Abraham does _not_ kill Isaac."

"But old Abe, you know… he had the intention," Booth murmured, looking out the windshield spotted with drizzled rain.

I canted my head and looked at the back of his seat. He referred to Biblical characters in that way more than he probably realized, relating and identifying with them as if they were familiar people in his own life. I thought it revealed more about him and his beliefs than he knew. One of the reasons I admired his faith was that he never flaunted it the way some "true believers" did, but he still held firm to it with the way he revered the life lessons it had attempted to instill. At the same time, he prioritized his most important values even over the stories, which only deepened my respect. It showed that he loved his son more than he loved a religious ideal, and it proved that he had actually _thought_ about the stories and the morals beyond just obediently conforming.

Brennan shrugged and looked out the window. Slyly, she glanced at Booth to see how he was responding to her new method of connection. "Well, _I_ thought what he had was faith."

"Look, _I_ have faith." He stated sternly. He switched the hands he was driving with so his dominant right arm was freed. He started to point emphatically at the radio display. "But if God himself came down, pointed at Parker, and said, _'I want you to –'_ well, you know, that's not going to happen." There was no doubt or argument in his statement. He just informed us of it very matter-of-factly. He might as well have said his name.

"Didn't Gabriel stop Abraham?" I wondered in the backseat, squinting at the roof of the car and trying to remember.

"Yeah." Booth nodded and snapped his fingers at me, pointing to my face in the mirror over the dash. "Grabbed his hand at the last second, right before the knife was about to go in."

Brennan nodded her comprehension and chose her words carefully as she tried to get back to the point she had originally been trying to make. "Okay," she said slowly, steering the conversation back in the right direction. "Then the lesson I would learn from the myth-"

 _"_ _Myth?"_ Booth repeated objectionably.

She didn't look too apologetic. "Well, it fits the definition," she offhandedly reminded him.

Before she could actually define 'myth' for him – which she looked like she might have been about to do – Booth conceded, seeing that the good intentions outweighed the choice of words. Talking rationally about merit in religious scripture was atypical enough. "Okay, fine." He acted like he wasn't happy with it, but the way he gestured wasn't very sharp. If anything, it belied fondness.

She continued with his assent. "-That when it comes to your children, your love has to be absolute. Gabriel represents goodness, what you know to be right." She uncrossed her legs and pulled on her seatbelt, stopping it from digging so hard into her shoulder. "Ergo, you have to remain open to what you know is true."

Booth laughed quietly, looking across the seat divider at her with definite affection. I questioned if they even remembered I was still in the back seat, slouching against the back of the seat. Teasingly, Booth raised his eyebrows at her teasingly. "Are you sure you're not religious?"

She laughed airily, shaking her head and making her hair wave and resettle. "Science all the way," she vowed solemnly, a small, secretive smile tugging at her lips.

"Science all the way," Booth repeated after her, sending her conspiratorial smirks to the side, pretending that he didn't believe it.

"Hey, even an empiricist can have a heart, Booth," she rationally argued for her own sake to get him to stop bothering her. I nodded silently where I sat and watched them with interest. Brennan and Booth had more heart than any others I'd ever met, and they were opposites in a lot of big ways. Compassion and passion aren't reliant on religious faith, compartmentalization, or intellectual experience.

Booth sighed. "Yeah…" His smile faded as he moved his hands again, smacking the lever on the left side of the steering wheel. The car started to make the rhythmic, quiet beeping of the turn signal. "Too bad Richardson doesn't," he reflected dourly.

Normally, I'd have protested how empathy manifested itself in different people in varying scenarios, and even reminded Booth that we'd proved Kyle was innocent. I elected to keep my thoughts to myself and preserve their moment, as Brennan seemed to agree with Booth's biased assessment.

* * *

Kyle was more than finished with the ordeal of his wife's disappearance. I stayed back to watch through the one-way mirror, and the second that Booth had opened the door to walk in, Brennan close behind him, Kyle was practically begging to be booked and charged.

 _"_ _Just lock me up,"_ the short-haired brunet begged, his hands on the table and his legs jumping nervously. _"I can't go through this anymore!"_

Booth and Brennan shared an alarmed look with each other as the widower raked his hands through his hair, caught his fingers on strands, and pulled. He looked exhausted to the point that he might've just blacked out there in the interrogation room if he was left alone for a few minutes. Tried as I might, I couldn't remember being worried about a suspect's ability to stay conscious before. Most of the time, it was a question of whether or not they'd lose their patience, or get so freaked out that they started to cry – particularly with teenagers like Camden Destri.

No matter how innocent Kyle turned out to be, and no matter how badly Booth felt about having falsely accused him when our murder victim first disappeared, the leading investigator had no time to waste with Kyle feeling sorry for himself. _"We know you didn't do it,"_ he sighed, sitting down across from Kyle while Brennan leaned on the wall farthest from the door.

Kyle's hands trembled in his thick, short hair. He looked up slowly, fearful that he'd completely lost it and started to hear things. With his lip trembling, he quietly asked, _"What?"_

Booth nodded impatiently. _"Evidence doesn't fit you."_

For a long several seconds, Kyle breathed heavily. He didn't seem to get the memo that he wasn't entirely out of the woods, or that he was still being spoken to by the FBI, but he didn't look quite as anxious, either. Color was already returning to his pale face. He watched his fingers curl into loose fists on top of the table and flexed his hands. Brennan looked directly to the one-way mirror I watched through, but because she couldn't see from her side, she ended up gazing to my left. I frowned disapprovingly, regardless of that she couldn't see. We were typically supposed to act like no one was watching.

Kyle exhaled noisily. His whitened knuckles turned a flushed pink as he gradually forced his muscles to relax. _"Then who was it?"_ His voice was quieter than it had been – so much so that I reached up to adjust my earpiece before I realized that nothing about the technology had changed. _"Who killed them?"_

 _"_ _You ran,"_ Brennan reminded him matter-of-factly. It never ceased to amuse me that some things annoyed the hell out of Booth and merely elicited a raised eyebrow from her. The two were so contrary sometimes, it was hard to believe they were partners, let alone effective ones. _"Seems like you'd be the one who'd know."_

 _"_ _I would've told someone if I knew,"_ Kyle argued with a scowl.

 _"_ _Right,"_ Booth agreed skeptically. _"Because, you know, you're such an honorable guy."_ Kyle's shoulders fell and he looked off to the right stubbornly. Booth huffed as his suspect refused to rise to the bait, and the agent sat up straighter. _"The knife, the rope, the sheeting – it all came from your place. Why didn't you tell the police it was missing?"_

The answering scoff sounded like it was hard enough to hurt Kyle's throat. _"What, you check what's in your garage every day?"_ He returned the interrogation disbelievingly. Booth didn't have a garage, but the message was clear. Especially with things like the small amounts of rope that had been used, it would've been weirder if Kyle _had_ noticed it missing from the industrial stock he bought. I checked all of my belongings before I went to sleep every night, but I knew that wasn't normal. It was a habit – like checking the locks and the windows – from living on my own in a place where I slept with a knife under my pillow, just in case.

 _"_ _If you didn't know anything, why did you take off?"_ Booth's scattered questions jumped from one topic to another without necessarily connecting or exhausting the previous question. It seemed weird, but the disorganization was actually strategic. It made it harder for a suspect to predict what was coming next, which made lying harder to do.

In hindsight, Booth had been nicer to me when he arrested me than he'd been to many people since. I started to wonder why, but quickly came to a conclusion that it was probably because, not only was I a minor, but I had cooperated willingly – which was more than a lot of our people did.

Kyle chuckled dryly. _"Because I'm a bastard,"_ he answered truthfully, throwing his arms up and letting them fall hard back into his lap. _"I'm' a selfish, pathetic bastard, and everyone had already decided that I was guilty."_

Brennan nodded along with Kyle and pointed to him with one hand. _"That's true, Booth,"_ she helpfully corroborated.

 _"_ _Bones,"_ he sighed exasperatedly.

The anthropologist didn't heed the subtle deterrent. She stepped away from the wall and leaned down over the side of the table, putting her hands down on the top. _"No one wanted to find another suspect,"_ she told Kyle, sounding as proud of herself as she was apologetic towards him. _"Holly and I kept insisting."_

Kyle nodded dully, looking up to her face in earnest gratitude. That appreciation was muted and dimmed by the circumstances. The FBI's accusations last year had ruined his social life and seriously damaged his business. It was nice that not everyone thought he was automatically guilty, but the repercussions of such an attitude were irreversible, and they didn't do him much good now.

 _"_ _Thank you,"_ he politely said, reaching up to rub his chin and look away from Brennan. _"Thank her, too."_

 _"_ _She can hear you,"_ Brennan assured, lifting her left hand and indicating the one-way mirror. _"She's over there."_ Booth put his face in his hands while I giggled. So maybe the one-way mirror wasn't as stealthy as it used to be; most people knew what it was upon seeing it. Blowing the cover for sure probably wasn't the best habit to get into, though, and Booth was definitely going to say something about it later on. _"But I didn't do it for you,"_ she went on to say, her sympathy morphing to distaste. No one deserved to be treated the way Kyle had, but that was no excuse for the way he had acted towards Carlie, either. _"You are a pathetic bastard. Your wife was having your baby."_

Kyle looked down. He should've known that that was going to come up at some point. _"Look,"_ he said, his hands balling up again. _"I did wanna leave her, yeah. I was out that night trying to figure out how to tell her, what with the baby and everything._ " He looked up again. This time, his eyes found Booth as he tried to convince them he had nothing to do with any harm coming to his ex. _"But for God's sake, I didn't want them to die!"_

For a moment, I tried to imagine myself being in Carlie's position. What would I have done if I was pregnant, but my significant other didn't want anything to do with me or his child? I shook my head. I was so against having children that the only way I'd be getting pregnant would be freak accident or sabotaged contraception. In the event of the latter, _I_ would not be the one being murdered. Being childless suited me far better than parenting would. Having a baby with someone raised levels of risk and dependency. I didn't trust anyone enough to rely on them to support me, not even Booth or Brennan. If I didn't have a job to supplement my bank account, then I would've fought a lot harder to get out from under Brennan's roof. As it was, nothing either of them did could completely hobble me, because I had money from my paid internship, I was building a better resume, and I had loose connections with other agents in the bureau. I didn't truly believe either of them would ever do such a thing to me, but having a contingency plan made me feel a lot safer. If I needed a backup with an adult female who lived with me platonically, how could I expect to ever permit myself to become more dependent on a male my age who I was seeing romantically?

Booth and Brennan had been having one of their 'moments' where he looks to see what she thinks and she did the same. They ended up locking eyes for a few seconds longer than either of them really needed to. Finally, Booth turned his eyes on Kyle again, deferring to her. _"So you have no idea who did this?"_ He asked less aggressively.

The widower covered his mouth with his fist. _"I should, shouldn't I?"_ He asked rhetorically and miserably. _"I mean, I ignored her for so long. It's like this whole thing is my fault, anyway."_ I frowned and sucked on my lower lip. That seemed unfair. People should be allowed to have their own agency. Kyle should be able to go take some time for himself without fearing about what someone else would do to Carlie in that time. He couldn't take responsibility for another person's actions. We weren't cavemen; it wasn't the man's responsibility to personally ensure that no other man bludgeoned his mate. _"You know, if I had been there that night, maybe they'd still be here."_ Well, that was possibly true, but it was still worthless to consider. It wouldn't change the past, and it still didn't make their deaths his fault.

Brennan opened her mouth slowly, hesitant to share information, but Booth gave her a slight nod and she went ahead. _"We think your child might still be alive,"_ she told him slowly.

Kyle paused for a second, then wiped his damp eyes with the backs of his hands. _"I don't understand,"_ he said thickly, swallowing hard past a lump in his throat. _"The bodies you found-"_

 _"_ _That wasn't your child,"_ Booth interrupted, grimacing as he recounted what sounded like a satanic baby-swap. _"Whoever killed Carlie took your child and left theirs."_

The man stared at the agent with wide eyes, looking faint. _"Oh my God,"_ he uttered, covering his mouth with his hands and leaning back. _"Then – so where's my kid?"_

Well, there was the bad news. We didn't know. At this point, their child could've been across the country or across the ocean in a human trafficking ring. I knew better than to say this, even just to Booth, but the fact was that unless we got lucky, the odds were not on our side. Why would someone bother abducting a living child and replacing it with another if it wasn't so that they could disappear with the new kid? When Booth reluctantly admitted that we had no idea where his son was, Kyle made a choked sobbing noise into his hands. Brennan looked distinctly uncomfortable with the turn of the room's atmosphere.

* * *

Hodgins was out of breath when he came into Angela's office without knocking. Brennan cut herself off mid-sentence as we all turned to the entomologist, whose gloves were still on his hands. Booth looked as if Hodgins' mere presence was annoying him already and he took a step further back behind Angela's holograph projector, which was still turned off. I almost laughed at his reaction. Booth and Hodgins were kind of weird – they liked each other when it counted, but the rest of the time, Booth was content to avoid the scientist.

"Zach was working in the other knife mark," Hodgins breathlessly started to give the exposition. I winced. _I probably should've been helping Zach…_ It was hard to balance lab work with field work sometimes. "I saw something staining the groove it left, so I did some tests. The stain was from _Betadine._ "

Saroyan became visible from behind Hodgins as she came to join us. Booth noticed her and gave her a small little wave, then glowered at Hodgins. Angela bit her lip and looked down to her tablet, pretending she wasn't there, and Brennan stared at the man very closely until he finally realized that literally no one understood what he was talking about.

As per usual, when he had to dumb things down even further, Hodgins deflated. "It's an antiseptic used to prep patients for surgery," he explicated, dejectedly stripping his gloves off of his hands and chucking them into the nearest garbage bin.

"Oh, so someone was being really _careful_ when they were cutting her up," Booth sourly celebrated, crossing his arms. If their goal was to be careful, then they had failed as soon as they were so overcome with rage that they just started violently stabbing.

The pathologist passed Hodgins and took up a standing position between him and Angela. "It was the _baby_ they were concerned with," she explained, reminding Booth that there had been some very deliberate end game.

I didn't ignore Saroyan as much as I just continued on the relevant point of discussion. "Who would know that?" I asked Hodgins, unfolding my arms. I recognized a lot more chemistry terms than most people on the street, but I hadn't known of this one, so I didn't know how common it was. Could someone who'd had surgery (and not been bleeding to death at the time) know about it? "Are we looking for someone with a medical background?"

Hodgins helpfully shrugged. I could practically hear him thinking, _I did my job, the interpretation is yours._

"Great. That's useful. Thanks."

Brennan looked to her side. "Were you able to get enough detail from the skull for a digital reconstruction?" She queried.

Angela brightened and nodded, turning her tablet in her hands. She pressed the bottom edge against her abdomen and cradled it in her left hand while she woke up her holograph imager. Booth jumped slightly when the orange glow turned on and the machine started to softly hum.

"Yeah. Since someone this young is still being formed, the features are more generalized."

Once the machine had booted up – which only took about ten seconds – the reconstruction started, projected in 3D before us. We migrated over towards the pedestal, where I found a place at the corner with my back to the wall and was quickly joined by Hodgins on my left and Brennan on my right. Saroyan went around to Angela's other side and stood between the agent and the artist. The pale skull appeared to hover, halfway translucent. There were small lines between the bones where the fusion hadn't completed.

This wasn't the first time Saroyan had seen what the technology had to offer, but it was one of the first times she'd been so close to the projector. She reached out to the corner and waved her hand in the orange light, watching the digital pixels pass over her fingers. "The last place I worked had a drunk sketch artist. Wow."

 _Well, that's not too surprising,_ I thought to myself. She'd worked as a coroner; there couldn't be much use for a competent sketch artist when everyone she saw was already dead. Still, while I didn't think her awe was particularly funny or cute, I could grudgingly admit that it was totally understandable. I'd done much the same thing.

Pink tabs started to show up over the bones, marking tissue depths and sinewy connections. Flesh was grafted over the skull, first the dark red of muscles and tendons, then the lighter pinks of fats and tissues, and then, finally, the pale off-white of an infant. The face was rounded, cheeks fat, and lips small and pouty. The baby's eyes were open, and Angela had chosen to fill them in with light blue irises.

"It's a baby." Hodgins stated. I'd have poked fun at him for saying it as though it were a revelation if he hadn't sounded a little irritated. "It looks like _every_ baby."

Angela rolled her eyes. "That's why I ran the reconstruction through an aging matrix. It posits the most likely growth pattern the skull would follow. Now, as it ages, the features become more distinct." Said program commenced. Although the changes were subtle, when they were fast-forwarded, they became more obvious. The cheeks thinned out a little, the chin became sharper, cheekbones more pronounced. The eyes opened wider and the skull grew gradually, facial features remaining proportionate with it. Fluffy brown hair grew, but Angela's program kept it short and ruffled around his ears. "By the time he's about ten, he shows very definite genetic characteristics."

That face bugged me. I narrowed my eyes at the holograph. It looked like any random kid on the street that I could've just passed by, but something about it rang familiar. His face looked effeminate, his eyes recognizable. When I realized who he reminded me of, I leaned back on my heels.

"Veterinarians would use antiseptic, too, wouldn't they?" I asked the obvious, not expecting a real answer. Saroyan and Angela both looked at me, but Brennan and Booth were already doing that thing where they shared meaningful expressions of understanding with each other. "How convenient that she heard Carlie say she didn't want her kid."

* * *

It was disgusting to me how she got away with it for an entire year. I didn't understand how she could look at the child every day and not hate herself for what she'd done. Between killing her own child – no matter that it was accidental – and then brutally slaughtering her friend, how could she dare trust herself with taking care of something so fragile and needy?

I was unconsciously echoing the same things that the social worker had said aloud on the drive over to the park where we knew we'd find Mary, Faith, and Tina. The social worker had been on Saroyan's insistence, which irked me, but I would admittedly much prefer having someone on hand to give the baby to. I wanted the child out of the way for his own safety, but I didn't want to spend the next several hours babysitting. I'm a fighter – not a lover, and certainly not a caretaker.

"Robbie!" Mary separated herself from her friends, inadvertently doing us a favor. "Don't eat that, honey," I heard her say at a lower volume, bending over Carlie's son, seated in a red toy wheelbarrow with his legs out in front of him, knees bent and legs delicately bowed. The tiny little thing looked up, some bright red plastic in his mouth and supported by his hand. She pulled it out of his mouth. "There you go."

"The marks on the ribs were made by a scalpel. The woman is a vet, so she has medical training, which also explains the betadine." Brennan was explaining the situation to the social worker so that she wouldn't be surprised by anything that came up. People don't usually admit to anything unless you prove you know what happened, and it was just better if the social worker – who may or may not have seen many situations like this – wasn't shocked.

"Look at her, playing with the kid," Booth muttered to me, walking closer than Brennan was. He and I were walking faster, too, and Faith, who was pushing her baby in a safety swing, looked over to watch Mary when she noticed us.

"I want the kid away from her," I returned, practically growling. Even if it was highly unlikely she'd hurt the child now, how the hell was I expected to believe he was safe when she had already killed two humans?

"Yeah, so do I." Going by Booth's grim response, he agreed with the sentiment.

Robbie didn't like that his chewing toy had been taken away, and since babies don't really have much of a vocabulary, he started crying instead, his eyes watering and mouth opening to sob. Mary picked him up with her hands under his arms and lifted him out of the wagon, brought him close enough for her to kiss his forehead, and then settled him down against her front, rearranging her arms to hold him comfortably.

"Miss Corbis," Booth called, getting her attention before she left her spot. Where she stood by the wagon was fairly isolated, since none of the other kids held any interest, and the other parents were staying out of the way of the police. In turn, Mary looked surprised to see us again; I wouldn't have seen it if I wasn't watching her hold of Carlie's son, but her arms tightened. Booth paused, as if trying to work out a kind way to word it, but sighed. "I'm going to have to ask you to hand us the child."

"What?" Mary pulled him closer to her chest. He was so small that the one hand she had against his back almost spanned entirely across with her fingers splayed. "Why?"

My expression darkened. "I don't think you really want us to remind you," I said lowly, aware that we were still in a very public place. There was probably a time when I'd have bluntly just come out and accused her of the murders she'd committed, but I'd grown up some and changed a lot, both by situation and necessity.

"No." She shook her head, short hair hanging close to her ears. "You want me to give you my son? No!" She moved Robbie against her side, holding him further away from us.

"He's not your son," Brennan objected from between and slightly behind Booth and I. Footsteps softly crunched on gravel as the woman from the agency walked around me to have a better view and make sure the child's safety was prioritized. I admire Child Protective Services for what they do, but my experiences with their members was soured by the way I'd been treated by one of them when we'd taken Shawn Cook into custody. "We know what happened."

She held the baby tighter. I figured there were probably more tactful ways to say this, but Mary didn't really deserve tact or subtlety more than she deserved a prison sentence. "He is," she insisted, glaring at Brennan, although her eyes were shifting between Booth and me, the two of us being the closest to her and, consequently, Robbie. "Robbie is my son."

Agitated, Brennan crossed her arms. "We have a warrant to take a DNA sample from you, Miss Corbis," she enunciated harshly in her irritation. "It'll be pretty hard to argue with that."

Robbie chose now to start fussing again, louder than the first time, waving his arms a little and demanding to be paid attention to.

"Sh, sh," Mary shushed, looking down at him and kissing the top of his head, looking at Booth out of the corner of her eye in case he crept up on her. She looked back up, Robbie unhappily babbling at her. "She didn't want him," the vet sniffed, blinking rapidly. "She told me she wished she had never gotten pregnant. It was _wrong_ for her to have him!"

There were so many reasons for me to disagree with that statement that I could barely even believe she'd said it. For one, people say stupid things when they're upset. I know I'd be extremely pissed if I was pregnant, but I'd take care of my child regardless. And if I couldn't, then I'd give them to someone who could, and make sure it was an open adoption so that I could be made aware of the steps taken and meet the family. Carlie could have done the same thing, if she'd lived long enough to be given the chance, and that was assuming that she didn't want her son in the first place, which was a pretty big assumption. Secondly, it wasn't up to Mary to decide whether or not Carlie had this right – she was the mother, she had the first right to her baby until she screwed up, which she hadn't.

But, mostly, there was the whole homicide thing. I was quick to remind her of that one. "Oh, but, of course, killing your child and then killing your friend is all totally _right,_ " I bit out at her scathingly, taking a step forward with my right leg.

I thought because I sounded mean, I stressed out the baby, who started crying louder. Robbie in turn upset Mary further, and she started having to blink to clear the tears out of her eyes, her voice raising in frustration.

"That was a mistake!" She yelled at me, furious that I'd reminded her. "I am a single mother! I'm alone!" _So are thousands of other parents, but the vast majority of them don't end up killing their kids, accident or not._ "I just – I just wanted him to stop crying." She sobbed louder than the child she held, and I bit my tongue before my focus shifted to that Cam had been right. "It was just – it was just a few seconds!"

 _That's all it takes,_ I thought, and it was unfortunate that infants, who couldn't defend themselves, were also so vulnerable to any sort of aggression, but that's what the adults are supposed to be there for – protection.

"The doctor said I was sick, but I'm all better now." She smiled, watery and half-pleading while she looked pathetic and miserable.

Booth glanced at me. "Miss Corbis…" he let his voice trail off in a warning.

She cleared her throat and straightened, glowering with fiery eyes. "You can't take him from me," she spat rudely. "I'm a good mother, you can ask anybody. I'm a good mother." She rubbed Robbie's back in small circles.

"Give me the child," I argued, holding out my hands before I advanced again, giving her the chance to just get it over with peacefully. "We'll take care of him," I promised, "And take him to his father."

"You can't!" I realized maybe a little late that those were the wrong words to calm her down, and Mary looked at me like I'd just said I was going to stick the kid on a high shelf. "That bastard never deserved his baby!"

"Well, from where I'm standing, neither did you."

Following my deadpan, her shoulders shuddered violently and she looked down. Aptly, she appeared like she'd been slapped with words alone.

"Give us the child," Booth implored again, soft and careful.

She swallowed and looked at Robbie with her eyes beginning to turn red from tears. She looked up at me again, then down like she was afraid, and hugged him. From the lack of argument, I figured that this was her giving in, and I let her have her goodbye for the safety of everyone involved. Lowering her head, she pressed her lips to Robbie's thin blonde hair.

When she lifted her head, her cheeks had tears shining in the sunlight and glinting in reflections. She hiccupped, and I took another step forward, reaching for the baby. She shifted him forwards, but held on tight until my hands were settled firmly under his arms. I pulled him gently out of her arms and she let go, hands falling limply to her sides, but her eyes remained glued on Robbie.

I moved out of the way quickly so that she could be arrested and held the baby against my front, shifting my arms quickly to get support under his thighs that leaned him against my chest. His eyes were all puffy from crying, but when he was switched to me from Mary, he'd temporarily stopped wailing.

It amazed me that a real, living human being could be so little and light. Lifting Robbie took almost no effort. He weighed probably less than a Corgi dog, and his sides were so soft, both from baby fat and lack of wear and build up. While not my first time holding a baby, it was the first time in a long time, and probably the only time I'd come to appreciate maternity on any level.

Mary kept crying while Booth took her wrists and held them against her lower back, hooking the loops of his handcuffs on her. "Mary Corbis, you're under arrest for the murder and kidnapping of Carlie Richardson and the murder of your son, Robert Corbis."

The last charge made her cry audibly and she protested, trying to move forwards, and her arms were pulled back by Booth's hold on the handcuffs. "No!" She nodded at me when she realized she couldn't move her arms. " _That's_ my Robbie, that's my baby!"

Booth gave me a look. I just lifted my shoulders and then looked down, and he gave her a nudge on the shoulder, then a more forceful push when she didn't start walking. He led her up towards the police car waiting for her on the tarmac in the playground parking lot. I looked to Brennan to see if she was going with him, but she was unfocused, the expression on her face sad and a little disturbed.

I sighed softly and looked down at Robbie, who reached out an arm for Mary in that direction, calling out in baby-speak. I copied what I'd seen her do to change his angle and swiftly got him so he was facing me, and I kept a hand on his back and an arm underneath his legs. Then I gently bounced my arms, making his body bob up and down a couple of inches. It didn't seem wild to me, as I was well in control, but he sniffled and his eyes went wide in wonder.

"Did you really have to say that to her?" Brennan asked, breaking her silence. She almost sounded remorseful.

Although the social worker was still there, I ignored her for the moment. I kept bouncing Robbie, and while I did that, he didn't start caterwauling again. His lungs were small, but it was still annoying. "Postpartum depression is hard," I acknowledged. I'd had depression – assuming I didn't still have it on some level – so I at least had an idea what it was like. "But it's no excuse for killing your child." I looked back down at Robbie and smiled brightly, giving him a positive atmosphere. "And no matter how desperately you want to prove you deserve to be a mother, no circumstances make it acceptable to murder someone else. Being a parent is a privilege."

I felt her watching me – felt them both watching, actually – but I was more attentive to the surprise I gathered from the anthropologist's posture than the social worker's expression. I could sort of get how it would be weird to see me babying the – well, the baby, but in the less-than-minute since I'd started bouncing him, he'd done a complete one eighty, and instead of acting like his pet had died, he was cooing at me as if praising me for my good entertainment factor.

A tiny, chubby little hand flew up and landed with weak force on my breast. I rolled my eyes. _Buy me dinner first_ and _I'm not your milk source_ were fighting on my tongue over which was better to say, and considering that Robbie was one year old, I was leaning more towards the latter.

"You're right," Brennan carefully responded, looking down at the boy with curiosity. "It is a privilege." I thought we had both learned something from this case that didn't involve the bureaucratic and power struggles at the Jeffersonian, and I felt a twinge in my chest that came less from being batted at and more from liking the trust and affection I'd almost immediately won over, but Brennan wasn't done. "Even though you don't want to be, I think you'd make a great mother – if not for anything else, then because you realize that."

I couldn't say I was flattered with her assessment, but I had to refrain from smiling anyway. Maternity doesn't work with me. Children of my own don't interest me, but being told that I'd have the capability – especially after my own mother apparently didn't – was nice to hear.

"Hey, I may look cute with the baby now, but trust me, I'm not cut out for it," I replied with more levity, only half-joking.

* * *

 **A/N: Well, I've only been procrastinating on this story for... forever.**

 **In my defense, I'm taking harder classes this semester, and chemistry is trying really hard to make me its bitch.**

 **General news: The story I mentioned in my last author's note? It's up. It has twelve chapters so far. Summary: White Collar soulmate!AU, Neal Caffrey x OC. That's it. That's the summary. The rest of it is on my bio and, you know, in the story. If you wanna check it out, it's called "Lie a Little Better."**

 **"Until the Day I Die" news: I lost where I was going with this story somewhere along the way, but I think I'm starting to find it again. I'm helping pick it up again with writing ideas that are loosely-connected one-shots that either didn't fit within "It's My Life" or I just didn't think of at the time. These one-shots are posted as a new story called "Snapshots." So far, there's only one up, but it's Holly, Hodgins, and Zach, set _very_ early in "It's My Life." Each one-shot will have its title, its summary, and its timeframe in the beginning before the piece begins, so that's where you should look if you want to know when it's set to avoid confusion, or if you don't like a plot and want to skip it. The next chapter to "Until the Day I Die" is almost finished and should be up soon - hopefully within the next couple of days.**

 **Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	11. Mother and Child in the Bay, Part Six

The door was harder than I had expected. It occurred to me after pounding my knuckles on it that maybe I had hit it with slightly more aggression than was necessary. Gentling the pressure, I hit it a couple of more times to make sure anyone inside heard me knocking.

There was a car in the driveway and it was well past the time that Parker got out of kindergarten (he'd started before Brennan and I took our vacations). The porch light came on automatically, but there was a silhouette visible through one of the windows. Where Booth had an apartment I'd been to a handful of times, Rebecca paid rent on a small duplex that she shared with her son.

The front door came swinging open not long after I stepped back, putting space between myself and whoever would answer. "Hello-" Booth's blonde ex opened the door with a curious, polite smile on her face that fell when she met my eyes. "Oh," she grumbled, discontent.

I tried not to feel insulted. I knew she didn't exactly _like_ me, but some courteousness would've been appreciated. Whether or not we were besties didn't change that some crazy discoveries had been made. For as long as she had ties to Booth (through Parker, if for no other reason), she would have to see me on occasion. Of course, that was based on the assumption that Booth wasn't going to get tired of me, but that seemed unlike him, and I lived with Brennan, so he couldn't exactly kick me out.

I held out my arms with as much sarcasm as I could force into a nonverbal gesture. "Sorry to show up unannounced," I declared to her. She leaned against the doorframe. Although that seemed like she was giving me her undivided attention, her pissed off expression and the way she blocked off the entry suggested she was not thrilled to be entertaining me. "But I've been trying to get in contact with you, and if I didn't know better, I'd say you were ignoring me."

Rebecca crossed her arms. Her hair was down and her outfit was casual. "So you decided to show up at my house?" She asked me, her lips pressed thinly. I noticed she didn't deny having been ignoring my attempts at communication.

"I need to talk to you," I said insistently, not budging from where I stood. I could've also helpfully reminded her that she wouldn't have needed to ask, had she made an effort to communicate. Wasn't _I_ supposed to be the one who sucked at talking? "And you weren't willing to meet on your terms, so apparently they'll just have to be on mine."

Rebecca tossed her head to look over her shoulder and then glanced back at me. She narrowed the width that the door was open. "Parker is asleep."

"I'm not here to see Parker," I readily answered. Truth be told, much as I liked the little kid, this wasn't a discussion he needed to be present for.

"Then what do you _want?"_ She hissed, glancing over her shoulder again. There wasn't another car in the driveway, so I doubted her new boyfriend was over, so that left one person she wouldn't want knowing that I was there. She only cemented my theory.

"This has got to stop," I said solemnly, looking down towards the porch.

"Excuse me?"

"You don't want me around Parker, do you?" I accused bluntly, picking my eyes back up to hers again. I was worried that I was overstepping bounds, but at the same time, I couldn't just stand back and let her issues with me continue to overrun her relationship with Booth. "I didn't want to consider that, but I've spent the last couple of days trying to think of anything else that makes sense, and I can't."

She shook her head slightly, her mouth still open. I nodded glumly. I had known it coming over, but that didn't change that I was offended and hurt by her beliefs. No one gave her the information to make a decent assessment of my character, and she didn't bother to show me the respect of sharing her concerns before she started to take it out on someone who wasn't involved with her issue.

Having it said aloud changed something. The blonde stepped out onto the porch, even in just her wool socks, and brought the door closed gingerly behind her. She didn't lock it, but she kept her hands on the knob behind her back.

"I barely even know you," she told me wearily.

"And you haven't tried," I mildly responded. She and I had what would normally translate to an ideal relationship, the likes of which Tessa and I had had. The problem now was that Tessa didn't have a son she could take away from Booth, nor did she make presumptions about me based on limited and likely biased knowledge. "You're going off of what little you know, and if you're getting it from the news, you have to realize that they skewer things. You can't accurately know someone from a few hurried reporters. I really don't want to cause a problem or stay here long, but I want to get one thing across – you can't take Parker away from Booth."

It went about as well as I had expected. Rebecca pulled herself up to stand higher, shifting her weight to her left leg. "Why can't I?" She challenged. "I'm his mother. I have the legal right to decide who has his custody and when. I have every right to protect my son."

 _You're protecting him from the wrong people,_ I exasperatedly thought at her. The difficulty I had with not rolling my eyes deserved its own applause. "Your son doesn't need protecting from any of us! I really like the kid, and I'm not a monster, I'm not going to hurt him." I pushed my hands into my pockets and stared down the few inches to her eyes. I had definitely gotten my height from Booth. "And you know that Booth adores him like he hung the moon. If me staying away from him is your condition, then _okay._ " My chest tightened, yet I powered through it with determination. Parker needed his dad more than I did. "I don't want to see Booth losing contact with his child."

"What, so you'll stay away from him?" Rebecca's disbelief was punctuated by her hands, which she settled on her hips. The gesture was less dismissive than keeping her hands on the doorknob. "You're his child, too."

"I'm an adult," I reminded her stiffly. "Maybe not quite yet, legally, but by every other means, I've already grown up." I hadn't gotten to have a relationship with my father as a child, but Parker was still able to. I could be bitter if I wanted, but it wouldn't help anyone. My grudges needed to lay with the people responsible, not with a kid who happened to be related to one of my biological parents. "I see him enough already. I work with him. I can see him personally when Parker _isn't_ around. If that's what it takes, then I'll stay away when he has Parker."

Thinking ahead already, I tried to imagine how I'd pull it off without the FBI agent becoming any the wiser to the motivation. I could probably put in extra time at the lab, maybe cite some white lie about Hodgins or Zach wanting me to stay late for projects. If I really had to, I could lie about myself, say I wasn't comfortable being around the child until I felt like I was less likely to impulsively hit someone who touched me. My self-control where that was concerned was much better than it used to be, and Parker, being so small, had never registered as much of a threat, but surely it would be buyable.

My eyes stayed locked on hers imploringly. It felt uncomfortable and vulnerable to be so see-through, but I needed her to believe me. Booth had done so much for me that he hadn't been required to, and he refused to let me pay back my debts. I had to at least do this for him.

Rebecca took advantage of my lack of guardedness. She peered right into my eyes as if she could see into my brain through them. "Why did you come here to tell me this?" She questioned intently, rooting out a lie or an ulterior agenda. "Why didn't you call? Or text? You didn't seem to have a problem with those." Her irritation almost brought mine back up to the forefront. _Well, if you'd acknowledged them, this would've played out differently._ "You came to my house, where my son is, _knowing_ why I'm keeping him away-"

"Because this is a discussion best held in person," I interrupted smoothly. Some things just shouldn't be handled over electronics. Too much was lost in translation. "You can keep him from knowing me if you want. You're his mom. I won't be happy about it, but I won't fight you, because it's your decision. More than I want you to trust me, I want him to be safe," I softly promised. I had risked my life getting children out of 9/11 when I'd hardly been older than many of them. What did that say about my character, my willingness to defend the helpless? Parker was safe with me. Any child was.

Parker's mother slowly nodded her head, hesitant to do so. It was as if she thought it was a trick, and I'd point out some clause hidden in the fine print the moment she signed on. "Okay." I smiled thinly. _Great._ "I'll let Booth have him this next weekend, alright?" She pointed at me, squaring her shoulders back. "But you have to keep your end of these promises, because they don't mean anything if you don't honor them."

My face remained totally straight. I thought of honor and I thought of standing my ground while being maimed by Kenton, of rising above my personal issues to be there when Booth needed someone who would listen. It hadn't even occurred to me at the time that I could do anything else. "I'm good at honor, trust me," I vowed, knowing full well that she had no reason to do so. "You can fault me for a lot of things, but loyalty to my word, and to the people I care about, is something I take very seriously. You will never be able to fault me for my loyalty." My integrity was a factor of my personality that I held in higher regard than anything else. "Thanks for listening."

The last thing to say felt awkward and forced. We'd kind of gone beyond polite niceties, but I didn't know how else to end it, and just walking away didn't come to mind until I'd already said a halfhearted attempt at an uncomfortable goodbye.

Rebecca's hands slipped off of her hips and in front of her. She caught one in the other and rubbed her thumb into the pale skin of her palm. "Thank you for caring," she said, frowning, looking as if she was no more comfortable saying that to me than I was with my conclusion to her. "And for… wanting him to have his dad."

"Yeah." I nodded noncommittally. Commitment was an issue for me. I was much better with conviction. Now that the latter had been satisfied, what did I do? I opted for a halfhearted wave, but I stopped halfway through. _I was wrong. I'm not out of conviction._ I might have a problem with committing to people, but I didn't have any objections to defending them. It was time I started including myself to the list of people who I would stand up for. "Oh, and one more thing-" I held up my hand with a finger up as I narrowed my eyes at the blonde. "You can keep him from me all you like, but I'm going to take twenty seconds here and defend myself. He's a kid. If he doesn't know now, then sooner or later, he'll find out that I'm his sister, and I promise you that he'll want to know who I am."

Her posture changed, set on edge almost immediately. I cursed myself for phrasing it like that and shook my head, quickly amending.

"This isn't me being arrogant, this is me speaking from experience." When it came to not having great luck with families, my team was probably in the lead. Booth and I both grew up with abusive parental figures to a certain age, Brennan's had abandoned her to the negligence of the foster system, and many of Zach's siblings bullied him. "I want to know about my brother, I want to know about my mother that gave me up." I meant Aaron that time, but Rebecca didn't know about him and in case she assumed I was speaking about Parker, I threw in my biological mom for good measure. She relaxed slightly, hands sliding into her pockets. "He'll go through that phase, and when he does, it's up to you to choose how to handle it. I'm asking you to do your best to handle it the best way for _him._ Not for you, not for Booth."

I hadn't had the answers about my family when I wanted them, and I regretted not trying harder to push and seek them out. If I had, maybe I could've connected with my father long before I actually had. If Parker started asking questions, he didn't deserve to be lied to, whether he was seven or seventeen, when he started to think about the people in his life more cynically. Having secrets kept from someone is obnoxious at best and cruel at worst. Given that I wasn't exactly a mass murderer, I believed I wasn't someone to be _too_ ashamed of.

But then, what did I know? I was just a street kid with a dangerous reputation. It was the entire reason I'd taken a taxi to Rebecca's duplex in the first place. She believed what she heard. Maybe she was right to. I didn't have what one might call 'safe' hobbies.

Did any of it matter? If I wasn't going to see Parker anymore, then I didn't have any children to worry about. I just had to keep myself safe and keep an eye out for threats to the people around me. Sure, I was disappointed that Rebecca thought of me that way, and that her beliefs were going to have such an impact on my relationship with my younger sibling, but blood didn't mean as much as sentiment, and Parker didn't know me too well. He'd get over it. I'd deal with it. Booth would have his kid back, and everyone would be happy enough.

Shrugging to myself, I turned around and hopped down the steps from the porch. Now that I'd made my deal with the blonde, I saw no reason to stick around. I was a little angry, a little hurt, and a lot agitated. The people talking about me behind my back were spreading rumors through the FBI and the media outlets that didn't paint an accurate picture, and the results of that were hurting Booth. I had thought I'd left a lot of the stigma behind when I moved out of that bad neighborhood and into Brennan's very nice, very respectable apartment complex, but evidently not. _Well, you can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can't force anyone else to believe that nature isn't innately tied to geographic location._ I snorted softly to myself.

The voice behind me raised itself into a quiet yell to my back. "That's it?" I stilled, hands in my pockets, and sighed, heaving up my shoulders. "All that and now you're just leaving?"

With a whirl, I spun back on my right heel. "Yep," I said, saluting her mockingly with a hand on my forehead. "I've said all I have to say."

"What am I supposed to say to you now?" She called back with a look of mild frustration, unsure where to go from here.

I huffed, then had to remind myself that my mannerisms were a lot different. I grew up in a way that meant when you were done with your business, you left. When my 'guardian' was done using me to vent his frustrations, he would leave. When someone was done scolding me for whatever the hell I'd done wrong next, they left me on my own again. I couldn't blame Rebecca for not handling a situation the same way I did any more than I could blame Parker for not knowing better than to grab at my hands.

"Not necessarily anything," I told her, acting as if I couldn't care. I did care, a lot, but if she knew that it was upsetting me to have my privileges to see Parker taken away for no reason other than paranoid conjecture at who I may or may not be, then she might have doubted my willingness to stay true to my word. "You're letting Booth have Parker; that's what I wanted. See you later. … Or not," I mumbled under my breath, pulling the back of my jacket against the back of my neck and crossing my arms to fight the breeze.

* * *

I still had mixed feelings about Kyle Richardson, what with the whole incident where he hit Karen and took off running, but I felt empathetic for him after everyone thought so badly of the guy, blamed for something he hadn't done. Those mixed feelings were sort of pushed to the side when I watched him pace anxiously across Booth's office, his hands wringing behind his back and unable to stand still with pre-fatherhood jitters.

"He's fine?" He asked again anxiously. He'd been repeating the same question with various phrases approximately seven times since we'd taken a seat to wait for the social workers to bring the child in.

"He's perfect," Booth promised, looking at Kyle with something akin to amusement.

"He's completely healthy and unharmed," I said, unwilling to agree that the kid was 'fine.' The only parent he had known for the last year was just taken away from him for good. In a few years, he probably wouldn't even remember Mary, but in the meantime, Kyle would probably spend many hours placating a toddler that wanted who he thought was his mother.

"And – you're sure-"

"He's yours," Brennan cut him off, having been the one to collect the DNA sample from the inside of the man's cheek.

Kyle breathed out nervously, swallowing again. By his behavior, anyone else would have thought he was being sent into a boxing ring or something. At least he stopped the increasingly annoying pacing. Seated in one of Booth's office chairs, I had one leg up high and crossed over my knee, drumming my fingers on my thigh. The jeans muffled the noise so my tics were at least quiet.

"When I thought he was gone…" the father crossed his arms and tucked his hands between his chest and his upper arms. "And Carlie…" _Hadn't been confirmed dead?_ I wondered sarcastically. A pregnant woman without a big trust fund wasn't very likely to be running away with no word or contact with her friends or family, even if her marriage did suck, so the conclusion that she'd been attacked at the very least was almost common sense. "I wished I could have changed how things had been."

The woman who had come with Brennan, Booth, and I to the park became visible through the open doorway. Kyle was looking at Booth, communicating something through the kinship of being parents, so he didn't see them. Robbie was dressed in a tiny outfit of a red polo shirt and denim pants, light-up Sketchers sneakers on his feet. The blond-haired baby looked around the FBI with curiosity, quiet as he was carried by a near-stranger.

Brennan was facing the doorway, too, and she saw the pair outside and motioned them in. Kyle saw Brennan's gesture and turned around quickly but then just looked like he'd turned to stone. I could've kicked him and he probably wouldn't have reacted. Completely gob-smacked by seeing his son for the first time, he stood still in the center of the room while the baby looked up at the social worker.

Brennan and Booth were both watching Kyle's back warily, watching for anything that might indicate he would respond in an inappropriate means to the child. The woman holding him looked down at the baby and smiled, walking a little further into the office. Kyle put a foot behind him in preparation to step back.

"Don't you want to hold him?" The social worker offered kindly, looking down at the toddler adoringly. She clearly enjoyed the part of her job where she, on rare occasions, got to reunite children with their parents.

 _I wouldn't mind holding him,_ I thought privately. I had never taken myself as a person who did well with children. Most of the time, they were headaches waiting to happen – loud, messy, and not yet with the decorum to not pitch tantrums every time they were told _no_. They broke things (sometimes on purpose) and played with things that weren't toys and had a penchant for getting into stuff that they weren't supposed to. More than that, anyone with a kid had to take care of it – feed it, clothe it, keep it healthy and safe, take care of it when it was sick or injured, interact with it so it could socially develop. It's a long-term commitment that requires more patience than I have. I'd rather just get a pet.

Recently, they had taken on a different meaning. Maybe it was meeting Parker and spending time with my newfound little brother, or maybe it was seeing how much children need a caretaker when Donovan Decker was kidnapped, but children were no longer little pests and they were more like the way I saw dogs – obviously _not_ dogs, but not just problematic commitments. Like with pets, you get back what you put into them, and I hadn't really felt that way about children until the last year or so.

Holding the kid, though, wasn't my place, and I wasn't going to ask just because I liked it earlier. Robbie isn't my child. If I wanted to spend time looking after children (the world has turned on its axis), then I should finish my internship, save up the money, and go get a degree in education. _Yeah, right._ I didn't know which was funnier – me being a teacher, or me being in college.

Kyle sighed, dropping his shoulders, and he came a touch closer to actually moving away from the child. "I don't know, um… the kind of guy I am…" He was torturing himself. The man was torn between wanting his child and being scared of the responsibility. "I'm no father."

I saw him getting closer to leaving his son to the system and talking himself into thinking it was for Robbie's benefit. That had happened to me a long time ago… not with the Kirklands, but almost eighteen years ago, I had been abandoned by my mother, who didn't even think about me long enough to tell my father I existed. I wasn't going to watch it happen to another innocent baby.

"Not your decision anymore," I snapped to get his attention, then calmed my voice to be less confrontational. Kyle whirled around to face me and I nodded towards the child again. He needed to look straight at Robbie, not avoid him. "You said just a minute ago that you regretted not having him. People very rarely get the second chance. You're already his father, so just learn how to be his _dad._ " Because there was a hell of a difference between the two. "And if you screw up," I added on a less serious tone, choosing to say 'if' instead of the much more accurate 'when.' It was just a matter of time until he made a mistake, but if he was a strong enough person to stick with it and stay loyal to his son, then he'd fix it and move on. "He's only one year old, it's not like he'll remember it later."

"You have a son," Booth told the man quietly, managing to sound very imperious and orderly as he did so. "Step up. Take him."

With the blessings (or, rather, pushes) from the two of us, Kyle moved forwards instead of backwards. The anxiety was palpable and might as well have been written on his forehead in Sharpie, but the social worker was kind enough to be slow in transferring Robbie from her arms to his, and then she moved one of his hands up to hold the kid with more support behind his upper back.

Kyle smiled very shakily at his son. "Hey," he drew out nervously, almost certain he was going to do something wrong. The kid was unusually quiet, but looked up at his father with huge eyes and… not a smile, but not a frown, either. _If I didn't know better, I'd say he recognized Kyle… but that's impossible._

Father and son reunited happily – or, at least, the father was happy while the baby was passive. Brennan looked at Booth contently to see his reaction and the agent was hiding a grin behind his hands. Kyle pulled Robbie up higher on his chest, pressed his cheek to the baby's head, and breathed deeply, shutting his eyes and fighting back tears. He kept his baby close and looked over his shoulder at Booth.

"Thank you." The most sincere thing I'd heard in weeks.

Robbie started to protest to being held quite so closely. Then again, he was a baby, so maybe he was actually crying from being separated from the social worker. Either way, I looked away from them and pretended not to care about the fussing kid beyond being annoyed and muttered helpfully, "He likes being bounced."

Booth's face turned questioning. Brennan grinned and bent over, cupping a hand over her mouth and whispering to Booth. His face lit up while they traded secrets. It really wasn't hard to figure out what was being said.

"Oh, man," Booth laughed heartily, grinning at my irritated scowl. I had a reputation, damn it, and the last thing I need is for him to start thinking I'm going to trip over myself to hug people and babysit children and be maternal and caring. "I wish I'd seen that!"

Setting my jaw tensely, I deliberately looked to the corner of the room and held my chin up indignantly.

* * *

I smacked Booth's crispy French fry away from the ketchup on my plate with my own fry and sent him a glare. Our blonde waitress only ever delivered first-class French fries, and I was _not_ willing to share.

"So you think Richardson can rise to the occasion?" Brennan quietly asked, leaning over the table with her arms crossed. She ignored that I was fighting the agent away from my food. "Be a decent father?"

I felt a little silly for getting trivial about my fries while she was apparently still concerned about Kyle and Robbie. I had already put them out of my mind. The problem with working cases was that it was too easy to get overly concerned to the people we would never talk to again. I had come into it thinking I could stay detached, but I'd learned shortly that it wasn't that easy. The best thing that I could do was try to draw a solid line between my life and my work, and the fact was that Kyle and Robbie both laid on the 'work' side of that line. I wasn't working, so I didn't want to worry about them.

"Well…" Booth no longer seemed to care about my fries, so the return to the case wasn't entirely useless. "He's got Carlie's parents to help him, and I like to think that people can change."

Brennan shook her head slightly, but she started to smile. Booth's optimism was rubbing off on her. "Faith and hope, right?" She asked knowingly.

"Right," he agreed, smiling back at her. I watched the two of them lock eyes and stare while I munched on my fries and regretted not saying something. Now they were off in their own world.

"Angela threw in love, too," Brennan added.

"Love is good," Booth agreed.

They were getting a little ridiculous. "Did I step into a chick flick or something?" I complained, picking up my glass of water.

My distraction worked like a charm. Although Brennan sent me a bewildered look with wide eyes, Booth chuckled and tried to steal a tax on my fries. I let him take one, just because I'd intentionally interrupted their 'moment.' "You're the one who got all sappy over a baby," he taunted.

Scoffing, I held up a hand and objected. "I was _not_ sappy," I maintained, glaring at him without heat. "I was _compassionate._ There's a difference," I muttered into my water while I took a drink.

The door to the diner at the front of the restaurant dinged with a tinny golden bell hooked to the door. When the bell rang, at least half of the patrons turned impulsively to look. I leaned to the side to see around Brennan and got a look at a blonde woman and a tall, brown-haired man in a leather jacket. The pair were both looking down at something below them, and in a few seconds, the thing hidden by the figure of another patron was visible to me.

Parker ran down the restaurant aisle delightedly, blond hair bouncing. "Daddy!" A cardboard box in his arms rattled. It was a shoebox held open with tape and popsicle sticks, and because it was for an adult shoe size, it was as long as his chest. "Daddy!" He chanted, running up to Booth. "Daddy!"

I glanced back up at Rebecca, masking my face swiftly. She _did_ realize that I was here, right? _This isn't fair,_ I thought, pursing my lips irately. _This is a public place. I have every right to be at this restaurant; you don't get to chase me out of diners._ Avoiding Booth's apartment was one thing, but avoiding any public forum they might happen to visit?

Booth had no clue that anything had happened between Rebecca and I, so for all he knew, this visit was entirely unprecedented. "Parker!" He called back to his son, matching the little boy's enthusiasm.

Parker shoved his shoebox up onto the table, facing Booth, so Brennan looked at the Nike logo on the back with her eyebrows raised. When the kid held his arms out expectantly, Booth leaned over and picked him up under his arms, lifting the kindergartener into the air and swinging him around onto his lap.

"Look what _I_ did," Parker boasted, completely forgetting about the people he'd come in with.

Rebecca and the brunet – Drew, I guessed – were still by the entrance. Rebecca seemed a little rosy and reluctant to come over, and it seemed like Drew was trying to talk her into it. I sent them another wary look before I changed my attitude, appearing less suspicious for Parker's benefit.

"Wow!" Booth wrapped his right arm around Parker's side. "Look at that!"

The shoebox had a lot of messily-cut and glued construction paper stuck in the insides, along with glitter, marker drawings, and toy animal figurines. It looked like there were supposed to be trees along the back of the shoebox, while the bottom was supposed to represent grass. The animals were small. Even the giraffe was only four inches tall, and its neck didn't reach all the way up to the drawn leaves.

Since children weren't expected to be Picassos or Degases, I overlooked those details and smacked my hand on the table, bouncing in my chair. "Is that a diorama?!" I exclaimed, forcing myself to get super psyched up. I felt ridiculous, overreacting so much to a kindergarten project.

"Yeah, yeah!" Parker clapped his hands. "I made it for my school!"

Comically, Parker did a double-take, and when he turned his head back to me, he straightened his arms and his legs in my direction, smacking my thigh with his sneaker. I pretended not to feel the sting against my leg and instead glanced to Booth to see what he thought. He playfully ruffled his son's hair. While Parker's eyes were closed and he was pushing his bangs out of his eyes, Booth raised his eyebrows questioningly. I nodded in acquiescence, and so Booth helped pass the kid over into my lap.

Parker was much bigger than Robbie, and he weighed a lot more, too. Luckily, he was still small enough to fit on my legs. I settled my hands on his hips to keep him in place with his back against my front. I could've set my chin on his head, had Parker not been so wriggly.

Booth slid partially out of his chair before Parker could decide to switch laps again. "Um, listen, you stay here with Holly, okay?" He said, holding out his fist. "I'm gonna go talk to your mommy, alright?" Parker bumped his fist against his dad's with a giggle. Booth leaned over and I leaned back, letting him kiss Parker on the forehead before standing up and leaving the table.

Parker watched Booth leave to go join his mom and Drew, his hands down on his thighs while he cocked his head. His excitement over his diorama was seeping out of him like a deflating balloon. Brennan sat there like she didn't know what to do. I shrugged slightly at her. Instead of helping me distract the kid from the tense-looking meeting of the three adults towards the front of the diner, she looked over her shoulder to watch Rebecca and Booth greet each other. Rebecca looked defensive, and Booth looked agitated.

 _Bringing Parker to this wasn't really necessary, was it?_ I hoped she wasn't about to give Booth any sort of ultimatum. The entire point of going to her was to resolve it without Booth suffering being put in the middle like that.

"What are all these animals?" I asked, looking into the shoebox and pretending I had the experience of a three-year-old where animals were concerned.

It served my purpose and distracted Parker sufficiently. "You don't know?" He asked, reaching out for the diorama. I held his waist tighter when his stretching over almost made him slide right off. It was like he didn't even notice. I pushed my French fries out of the way with my left hand after Parker was rebalanced, and he dragged his project closer to show it off. "They're all at the zoo!"

"You know, I haven't been to the zoo in so long, I think I forgot at least half of the animals!" I exclaimed, trying to sound disappointed.

"Oh, no!" The kid's eyes popped and he cupped his mouth in horror. "You've gotta go so you can remember them!" He urgently told me, patting my leg.

Over the top of the shoebox, Brennan was staring at me with her head canted. I rolled my eyes and nodded over her shoulder. She took another look at the small family. Rebecca and Booth were both less closed off, but Rebecca's boyfriend looked uncomfortable. She turned back to us to give them privacy and nodded to show she understood what I was doing.

Parker, however, didn't. "Dad!" He yelled across the diner.

The good thing about our favored joint was that it was very family-friendly. It was usually calm, but none of the staff ever got mean or short-tempered when a child made some noise. Still, I felt more attention from other people come to us, and it made me a little uneasy. I shushed him gently.

Booth and Rebecca both looked over to us. I felt like a deer in headlights when Rebecca spotted me holding her son on my lap, but she didn't seem to care. No oath of vengeance seemed to cross her expression, so I assumed it wasn't as important as whatever discussion she was trying to have.

"One second, bud," Booth promised, holding up a finger and glancing around as if checking to see how disturbed the public company was.

"But Dad," Parker whined, "It's important!"

I drummed the fingers of my right hand against Parker's hip to settle him down. He twisted around quickly to look up at me, and his soft hair rubbed against my neck. "Hey, kiddo," I said quietly, "I think Daddy really needs to talk to Mommy right now." Using those names to refer to Booth and Rebecca was foreign. It was downright _weird,_ where Rebecca was concerned. Here I was, a person smart enough to graduate high school at sixteen, claiming she didn't know what a lion was and saying 'Mommy' and 'Daddy.' "Why don't you show me how brilliant you are and tell me the names of the animals while we wait?"

Parker's pout went away when I complimented him. He reached into the diorama with newfound excitement and I once again caught myself holding a little tighter to his sides so he didn't slide around. He pulled out a plastic feline with big teeth and black stripes.

"This one is a tiger," Parker explained to me imperiously, holding his back straight and his chin high. Brennan started to smile to herself as his demeanor changed. Both of us gave him our rapt attention. "You can tell because it has stripes." The blond touched the painted black lines and then held it out across the table for Brennan to see. "And it's orange!"

Obediently, Brennan took the tiger from him and turned it over, looking at it and feigning puzzled interest. I rolled my eyes while Parker wasn't looking. He swapped figurines with Brennan, replacing the tiger while she balanced a brown-furred monkey in her palm.

"This is a monkey, and they're Dad's favorite." I smirked. Now that I knew that, I was sure to find some way to tease Booth about it. I nodded attentively as Parker told me how important it was that they ate bananas, and how monkeys were so cool because they could swing on trees with their tails.

Brennan asked Parker what _his_ favorite animal was, and the question took the little boy off-guard. He had to sit back against my chest and think about it while we waited patiently. Brennan stood up from her chair so that she could see over the back of the shoebox, and she placed the monkey carefully back in the 'grass.' I kept looking over to Booth, worried about what they were talking about. As Parker leaned over the table and carefully considered the available toys, I spared another glance in their direction. None of them seemed as confrontational; Drew looked significantly less like he wanted to flee.

Parker picked up a golden lion with a huge orange mane. "These are my favorite!" He declared loudly. "It's called a lion."

"They have _lions_ at the zoo?!" I asked with surprise. "No way!"

"Yes way!" Parker clutched the lion figurine in his small fist and held his arms out. "They're really big, like – like _this_ big!" He struggled to hold his hands far enough apart, but his arms just weren't long enough. Neither were any normal human's, considering that lions were pretty big. "But not as big as giraffes. Giraffes eat from the trees because their necks are _so_ long, they wouldn't fit in here!"

Although I saw Brennan biting her lip before she said something (probably about how Parker had the causation reversed on the tree-feasting and the long necks), she politely remained a child-friendly audience.

"You're kidding me," I exaggerated my own interest. If Hodgins ever saw me interacting with Parker like this, I would probably lose my nickname of Xena and he'd start calling me something far less badass. "Their necks cannot _possibly_ be that long."

We all stopped talking about the animals when Booth and Drew both came towards the table. Parker hurriedly returned the lion toy back where it belonged in his diorama so that it was good as new when he presented it to Booth. Drew lagged slightly behind the taller FBI agent and didn't quite seem sure where to go. I tried not to stare at him, but the first thing I wanted to do was study him and get an idea of who he was.

Booth took his seat back and reached out for Parker, rubbing the kid's shoulder while minding how close he was to me. I liked how much attention he paid to avoid touching me without permission. Even though I'd said I was okay with Parker, he still didn't take for granted that I wanted him invading my personal space, too. I was still upset sometimes that I needed that courtesy, but most of the time, I was just thankful that he never pressed me to get over myself and learn to be tactile.

Drew sat down in the chair next to Brennan. "Excuse me," he said politely. His voice was a tenor, a little higher than Booth's, and he chuckled nervously when he scooted behind her to get to the chair on her other side. "Hey."

"Hi, Drew," Parker and I chorused. Parker sounded earnestly happy and he waved his arm. I just lifted my hand from Parker for long enough to show him my palm in what passed as a halfhearted gesture.

"Oh… hey." Drew said to me, his smile kind but unsure. He focused on Parker. "Hey, buddy! Did you show them what you made?"

Booth studied Drew as he talked to his son in a way that reminded me of a hawk watching a mouse. I made a mental note not to stand in between the two of them. Up by the cash register, Rebecca was taking out her wallet and handing over a bill to the staff behind the counter and anxiously watching what was happening at our table. When she caught my eye, she motioned subtly with her lowered hand to come over to her.

I didn't want to make it too obvious to anyone else that Rebecca was signaling me over. Booth seemed calm. He would've have been, had Rebecca brought up my unannounced visit to her duplex. To keep things between us, I manufactured a less obvious escape from the table.

"Hey, remember how you said you liked hot chocolate?" I asked Parker, bending my neck to look down to his face. He turned his head to the left to look up at me, a big grin on his face as he guessed that I was about to offer hot chocolate. "Well, I _promise_ the hot chocolate here is really good. Like… _really_ good."

"Is it better than yours?" He asked eagerly. He wouldn't shut up about the hot chocolate I made him at Booth's apartment for more than an hour. I refused to admit to either of them that the reason he liked it so much was because I used two packets of chocolate powder instead of the standard one.

"Oh, I dunno," I sighed. The diner probably used the standard amount of chocolate powder when they made hot chocolate. "That's a pretty high bar, but I swear they're worth trying."

I must've sold it well enough, because Parker nodded contently. I passed him back to Booth, who turned Parker sideways across his lap while I got up. Once I slipped out behind Booth's chair, the agent plopped his son back into the seat I'd vacated. Parker giggled and swung his legs, grabbing onto the edges of the chair on both sides possessively.

With all three adults paying attention to the cute little one, I got up to the front without being watched by Brennan _or_ Booth. I went ahead and asked for the hot chocolates from the blonde waitress who delivered our fries (her nametag called her Joanne). She rung it up on the register and I passed her a debit card, which she swiped through her card reader swiftly before handing it back. A moment later, I held my hand out for the receipt and shoved both into my back pocket. Joanne left the register to make the drinks, but I leaned against the counter to the right of the pay station and turned to face Rebecca, crossing my arms.

She held up her right hand and picked at her cuticles. It was not the easiest discussion I had ever had, but I took a deep breath to prepare for it before I could convince myself to half-ass it. This was serious. It was important – if not for me, then for Booth.

"Thanks," I decided to start. Swallowing my pride and showing some gratitude didn't come naturally to me. I thought she should've been apologizing to me, but arguing over who was more at fault for the tension wouldn't have solved anything. It would've just ruined what looked like it could be a nice afternoon. "For doing this, and not making it obvious that he was wrong about the actual issue."

At what point was it wrong of me to go behind Booth's back regarding matters about his son and his co-parent? Was there a right answer? Did my intentions make it okay? I'd have asked someone if I had someone I trusted enough to ask. It was a personal matter, and my choices probably revealed more about me than they did about anyone else. I might've gone to Angela or Amy, but I knew it would've been inappropriate for either of them to be told about troubles in Booth's personal life. I still wasn't sure it was my place to be aware of them, but he seemed to think that it was my right to be involved with him and Parker.

Rebecca, like me, had to stop herself from chickening out of saying what needed to be honestly said. She came up on my side and grabbed onto the bar counter, holding to the edge tightly. "Look – you were right," she copped, looking away from me and up to a framed photo on the wall. "He's an amazing father. And Parker adores him." She dragged her eyes back down to me. The eye contact wasn't hard on me; I was used to uncomfortably looking people in the eyes, whether it was out of awkwardness or as a challenge. "I can't take them away from each other. And I don't think I can take him away from you, either.

"When he comes back from Seeley's, he's so happy, and he goes on about you like his hero." Rebecca laughed softly, a little bit incredulous. She was displaced by my sudden intrusion on the Booth family, and I think that Booth forgot to consider that in light of how displaced _he_ was. "I don't know you that well. You have to understand, all I knew was that you were his other child, who I'd never heard of, and then when I Googled you, you're involved in all this death and murder stuff. I mean, when we met, you were half dead. Sorry," she added quickly after she realized how she sounded.

She had first met me when Booth talked her into letting Parker visit me in the hospital. It had been within a few weeks of my emergency surgery, and I had barely even been able to walk across the room on my own. I remembered that time with bitterness and frustration. I'd felt so vulnerable and weak.

"No, that's – I mean, I _felt_ half dead," I assured her. "I totally get that."

She hesitated, picking at her fingernails blindly. "You bothered me a lot, but you made me realize yesterday that I don't dislike you, I dislike the _idea_ of you."

I wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but it didn't sound particularly flattering. "Thanks," I remarked sarcastically.

She held up one hand to stop me. "I didn't always have the whole story, and for one, I thought, well, if he'd left you alone, maybe he'd do that to our son." When she put down her hand, I had already caught my breath and was standing up taller to defend Booth, angrily narrowing my eyes. She stopped me before I could. "-But he hadn't known you were born." I bit my tongue and settled down, but I was still bristled. Booth had done nothing to deserve that sort of cynicism; he deserved to be granted the confidence that he'd do right by his responsibilities.

"And then I thought, for a kid to be in these kinds of situations – what does she have to be like?" Rebecca's expressions went through the gambit, from confusion to trepidation to annoyance, as she told her story. "And for a long time, it didn't really occur to me that maybe you were doing your job for the right reasons, rather than because you're being rebellious or reckless. Seeing you with Parker right now, it just proves it."

 _Someone who was just rebelling social conventions wouldn't have stabbed a mercenary for the sake of a tortured child._ I didn't conform to the conventional norms. Sometimes I wished I did. Other times, I was glad I didn't. In this case, I didn't know if I was relieved that I didn't or not. If I had, this conflict may never have happened, but I also would've probably tried to stay far away from the lab, and would've lost out on an entire team.

Both of us looked down the aisle to the table. Parker was going through his animals again, showing them off to his dad proudly. By the smile on his face, anyone would've thought he'd won the Golden Globe. Drew occasionally pointed something about, and we could see by the kid's expression that Parker jumped on the topic, stumbling over himself to talk more about that one specific thing, and Drew would sit back and watch with a laugh. Even Brennan seemed engaged by the little one's keenness.

"He's pretty lucky," I wistfully said aloud without thinking to stop myself. I had no memories like that. Parker had more than he could count.

The closest I had come to having people to show off to, who I would intentionally find and talk to, were a couple of men I'd met in New York City. Truth be told, I would probably never tell anyone about them; I'd met them on the streets, and they weren't exactly the ethical kind of people. Not to say they were _bad_ people – their interest in me was never malicious – but they'd taught me a lot. Mostly, they'd helped me improve on my skills at bluffing, lying, and deceiving. I knew they were street con artists, but thinking back on the last few times I saw either of them, I'm reasonably sure that they were up to something a bit more high-stakes than corner hustling.

The closest thing I'd ever had to what I was currently watching had been with a couple of conmen who felt badly for a neglected little girl who was left to wander the huge city all day, and instead of showing off school projects, I would boast by lying better. I used to long for a kind of home like the one Parker had. It was too late for me to have that experience, but I could still contribute to other kids having it, whether that meant protecting them and their guardians from killers or ensuring that Parker was never alone.

After several moments of reflection, Rebecca cleared her throat. "I reserve the right to hold judgment," she warned, "But I can't ice you out because I don't know you, or he'd never know anyone else."

"Thanks," I said shortly, surprised by my reminiscence back to my "friends" from New York. It had been a long time since I'd thought of them. These new stones being overturned – trying to find a place to fit in this new family – were dredging up old grudges and repressed feelings, some of which I hadn't even known existed. "No, I was sincere that time," I promised when Rebecca looked a little irritated. "You don't trust me – yet – because you don't know me, and you're not entirely sure that Parker is safe with me. I could be upset, but honestly, I really do understand. I get how I come across, I get how my situation sounds."

I'm not the kind of person someone would want to bring home to the parents. I get in way over my head and manage to doggy paddle ashore every time. I'm great at surviving, but I'm not so good at living within the expected perimeters of a normal and safe lifestyle. The way I was raised ensured I'd never be normal. The price I had to pay for becoming who I was would be the skepticism and the criticism of who I used to be.

Joanne came back to the counter, holding two ceramic mugs topped off with whipped cream. She put them down on the table and then took a pen out from behind her ear, lifted a notepad from her apron, and went to take another order when she saw that Rebecca and I were having a not-so-lighthearted talk.

"And, while we're being truthful," I added conversationally, picking up the mugs and enjoying the tingling of heat in my hands. "Thanks for not wanting Parker near me when you didn't think he was safe. If you had thought I was dangerous and not done anything to protect him, then I wouldn't be able to respect you as his mother." I smiled thinly at her. "Truce, then?"

"Yeah. Truce." Rebecca almost moved to shake hands before she saw that mine were already occupied. I was silently grateful for Joanne's timing, because no matter how gracious Booth was about my aversion to touch, not everyone took it for what it was. Sometimes it was read into as being rude or dismissive. "I'm tentatively extending the title of his sister."

"Ooh, what an honor," I said dryly. I meant it sincerely, but there were a ton of other implications to it that I needed to be able to sort through myself before I could even imagine someone else calling me their sister – especially someone as young and innocent and trusting as Parker. Last time I'd started being okay with being introduced as someone's sister, it had ended with being abandoned.

The two of us went to rejoin the quartet already at the table. I was unsure how we'd work out the logistics of the seating – we were going to have to add another chair to the aisle and take up more space, and even then, Parker would still need to be on someone's lap.

I leaned over next to Brennan. I still clearly remembered being seated between her and Zach and feeling claustrophobic and nervous. It amazed me sometimes how they'd been able to win my trust – she could've easily grabbed at my throat while I was bending over to plant the hot chocolate in front of Parker, but it didn't occur to me to be wary.

"And what were you talking about?" Booth asked Rebecca and I, wearily interested. He was holding onto the monkey figurine. Like Parker said, it was his favorite.

"We were bonding," I answered airily. It wasn't exactly a lie. Booth looked past me and to Rebecca, who must've corroborated it, because he seemed a little bit disappointed that that was all there was to it. "No, you're supposed to look more scared," I corrected him seriously.

Parker giggled. I'm not sure he even knew what 'bonding' meant for the context – given the people involved, it was a big step of progress. Thanks to our discretion, Rebecca and I were likely the only people who realized what progress had been made. I felt oddly at peace with the decisions I'd made to get there, even though they'd excluded Booth. It had ended well, with mature, adult conversations, and I'd owned up to my own flaws and reputation. I felt like maybe I'd started to pay him back for everything he'd done for me.

Brennan looked up to her left at Rebecca and started to get up from her chair quickly, preventing the blonde from needing to pull up a new one. Booth watched her start to leave with confusion before he held out a hand to stop her.

"It's okay, Bones," he promised. "You can stay."

"It's… a family thing." The anthropologist smiled wanly and gestured from Rebecca to Booth. I nodded my agreement with her and patted my pockets, just to check that I had my things. The brunette bent over to wave to Parker. "Bye, Parker."

"Bye," he said, looking up at her with big, admiring brown eyes.

Brennan went past me to leave the diner. I pointed over my shoulder with my thumb after her. "I guess I'll be at the apartment," I told Booth, giving Parker a wave. "I still have to write out official documentation on the Richardson case."

Booth disappointedly frowned, but looked like he was putting his foot down on the number of people departing. No one was more surprised than I was when Rebecca beat him to saying anything. As the woman sank into Brennan's abandoned seat, she lifted her chin to see me and offered, "You should stay."

Booth raised his eyebrows, but nodded decisively and picked up Parker. Parker squealed and giggled as he was carried through the air and back onto his dad's lap. "Yeah, kiddo." He gave the legs of my old chair a kick to push it out. "Like Bones said, it's a family thing."

I hesitated, looking them over. Talking theory with Rebecca was a lot different from sitting down and letting them imply that I was part of their family. I still felt like an outsider. There was no guarantee I ever _wouldn't._ Sitting down with Booth and Brennan was one thing, but with Booth, Parker, Rebecca, and Rebecca's boyfriend, all at once, without a fast escape route?

 _I'm acting like it's a trap,_ I thought with a little bit of wry amusement. _It's sad that I have to think of it that way._

"Well, I see I'm outnumbered," I said slowly, going behind Booth to reclaim my chair before Parker got any funny ideas. As I took my seat again and sent a final, reassuring look in the direction of the door ( _yes, the exit still exists_ ), I reached to the lanyard around my neck and pulled it out from under my jacket. "Hey, man, I'm Holly. I work with him." I motioned to Booth with my free hand and showed Drew my Jeffersonian ID card. With my hands thus occupied, I had gracefully gotten out of any handshakes.

"Drew," the brunet replied in kind, grinning at me friendlily. "It's good to finally meet you." _Now that's something I don't think I've ever heard_. "Parker's telling me he wants to take you to the zoo, pronto."

Parker complained to Rebecca when he remembered that his mother was the only one who hadn't been appraised of the travesty. "She hasn't been there in _years!"_

I could've made a comment about how I saw a lot of monkeys where I worked, but because I didn't work at a _zoo,_ per se, that probably would've been a little mean to say about Hodgins.

"Oh, that's not good!" Rebecca, appalled, leaned back and crossed her legs. "How could you stay away for so long?" She asked me in feigned amazement.

"I was going to the aquarium instead!" I lied, sending Parker a grin. "When was the last time you saw real, live sharks?"

Parker's eyes got huge and he pulled on Booth's sleeve. "Dad, can we go to the aquarium? I wanna see the sharks! They eat people!"

"And we eat them," I countered casually, drinking some of my hot chocolate. It had cooled down enough to sip at without burning my mouth, but I had to lick away whipped cream from my upper lip.

"Why do we eat animals?" Parker stuck out his lower lip and pouted. "That's mean!"

"… Parker," I said cautiously, "Where do you think meat comes from?"

Before any revelations were made to the unprepared child, Rebecca drew a hand across her throat to stop things from getting any further, nervously clicking her fingernails on the table. Drew covered his mouth with his fist and coughed to try not to laugh. Booth came to the rescue at his ex's signal, distracting Parker from what I had asked.

"Why don't we go to the aquarium this afternoon, okay?" He suggested, rubbing his son's back. "And maybe afterwards, we could all go out to dinner, if it's okay with your mom." He kept pushing his hand around in small circles on Parker's back.

"Yeah," Rebecca agreed readily, visibly relieved just not to have the conversation about where our food came from. I exhaled quietly and looked out the window. _The longer you let him believe it magically appears packaged and processed, the higher the chances he'll find out from someone else._ Like Santa, I suppose. His parents could have that discussion and decide when he was 'ready' to learn the truth. "That sounds good."

Parker smiled at Drew and enjoyed the attention being laid upon him by the adults at the table. "My dad knows a burgers place," he said wisely.

"Yeah," Booth chuckled, knowing immediately which restaurant Parker was referring to. It spoke to many a meal there and a lot of shared history. I smiled sadly at the window and found a way to make it more convincing before letting Parker look at my expression again. "I used to take him there after his T-ball. Tell Drew about the burgers," he prompted.

"He says they're as big as my _head!_ " The boy exaggerated, holding his hands on both sides of his face.

"Yeah, as big as your head," Booth perpetuated the hyperbole. I rolled my eyes good-naturedly and came up with a few child-friendly smartass comments for when we were shown these burgers in person. "We can all go." He dropped his voice and whispered to Parker playfully, "We can even bring _Drew."_ He said it as if it was a burden. Parker giggled. Drew stuck his tongue out at them both.

I still felt like I was imposing. They had inside jokes I didn't understand, and they wanted for Parker to learn certain things at certain times. I didn't know what was okay to tell him and what wasn't. Booth had called me part of the family, but I'd been on my own for seventeen years. Did I even know how to adapt to _be_ part of a family? Maybe I was more of a burden than anyone else at the table.

* * *

 **A/N: This one's finally done! Onto the next chapter!** **I know this chapter didn't have a ton in it, plot-wise, but I needed to resolve what I'd started with Holly and Rebecca. The final chapter was just getting to be abnormally long, so I halved it.**

 **Note: The short mentions of the street hustlers Holly met in New York are characters from another TV show. I'm not making a thing out of it right now, but I'm leaving it as is in case I want to follow through with a crossover idea I had. If anyone can guess who those characters are, I'll send them a PM with the premise of what the crossover would be!**

 **Hints: There are two of them, they are located in New York City (think Manhattan), they work cons, and (bonus: this one wasn't in Holly's recollection) one of them is very charming while the second is paranoid and dramatic.**

 **Love it? Hate it? Let me know! (And comment your guess on the crossover!)**


	12. The Boy in the Shroud, Part One

Brennan and I received a vague phone call from Booth while she was still in the shower, and by the time she had had time to finish her grooming routine and we'd driven out to the other side of the city, the crime scene team had already invaded the space. The media hadn't caught wind of anything weird, and we were pretty out of the way, so there weren't Smartphones out taking pictures.

Crime scenes were messy and gross, ninety percent of the time. Sometimes, the bodies would be practically _just_ bones, and there wasn't much of a smell. Those were ideal for not carrying around nose plugs. It was best when it overlapped with the kind of disposal that was somewhat neat. Penny Hamilton's murder site had been gory and garish, but I'd seen a few that were much more tolerable to my senses – squeamishness included.

This was not one of them.

I gagged while getting out of the small, silver car and covered my mouth. "Can I just spray perfume up my nose, or would the chemicals do something bad?" I asked, eyes watering.

"I imagine that having such a high concentration near your nostrils would make the scent pungent and repulsive," Brennan answered after a moment of thought. I hadn't really planned on her taking it seriously, but it was nice to know she listened. "Booth! What do we have here?"

'Here' was an alley at the site-of-the-week. It was a wide one in between two tall, old buildings. The main road had been closed down for tow trucks to get in, but the last one had pulled away with a terribly mutilated convertible as Brennan found illegal parking temporarily permitted to the police and associates gathering to take care of the accident. The street was going to remain closed on both sides of the intersection for a while. It looked like the car wreck had pushed the convertible into the gap between buildings, where it collided with a couple of filthy dumpsters and knocked them over.

Hodgins, standing near to Booth as he said a peppy hello to the annoyed investigator, had on rubber boots, long-legged and long-sleeved dark blue lab clothes, and latex gloves that disappeared up his sleeves. He waved brightly to us, looking like Santa had made an unscheduled visit.

"Bet I know!" He cried delightedly. "That's lasagna, fishy rotten cat food, and…" I held my hand over my nose and mouth and stared at Hodgins. He took in deep breaths of air, intently sniffing. Even Brennan looked disgusted. "… Vulcanized rubber!" He proudly identified.

Saroyan, who was sifting through trash (even I didn't dislike her that much), was the only one even a little impressed. "Excellent olfactory talent, Hodgins," she praised while Booth moved several steps further away from the entomologist.

Brennan still seemed disgruntled, but she got to business. I looked down at the ripped bags and waste pooling in one giant disaster zone and made sure that my shoes were safe. I would hate to have to burn them and then go to the trouble of getting a new pair.

"What happened?"

"Well, it's obvious, isn't it?" Booth had a pen stuck behind his ear. He raised his arm to point out to the intersection. "A guy tried to beat the yellow light and he got T-boned by a tractor trailer."

"Yikes," I remarked. "Hospital?"

"Oh, he's gonna be there a while," Booth confirmed.

"Was the corpse in the semi?" I asked, grudgingly taking a pair of light blue rubber gloves out of the pocket of my pants. They were wrapped up in a zipped plastic bag to keep them clean. I pried open the seal and took them out to begin working. It was a bit late to feign a cough, although had I known what I'd be coming to work amongst, I probably would've given it a decent attempt.

"Ah, no. The semi was carrying a load of aquarium sand, but that's not-"

"So… no explosion," I summarized.

"No corrosive chemicals!" Hodgins called brightly, far too happy for someone wading around in trash this early in the morning. Now that I thought about it, the reason he was vague was probably because Booth knew we'd have probably avoided coming.

I paused before stretching my second glove, twisting to Brennan inquiringly. She cocked her head at Booth, seeming irritated. "So what do you need us for?"

Saroyan looked over her shoulder where she knelt down. "You might want to prepare yourselves," she cautioned lightly. Brennan and I shared a long look with each other, then we both turned our deadpan expression on Saroyan. We weren't exactly new at this, and I couldn't honestly imagine anything making me more nauseous than Kenton's attempted murder or Epps' prison block. I had yet to be sick from either of those things so far. When no one replied to her, Saroyan took another look to make sure we heard, only to be faced with our _are you kidding us_ looks. "… Or, uh, not," she amended, looking away before we saw her facial reaction.

I imagined it probably wasn't very nice to us.

Booth waved for us to follow and went further into the alley, moving up towards Saroyan. Brennan and I shared another disappointed look before she shrugged. I took off after Booth, leading Brennan and carefully picking my way around things that should've been scorched into ashes long ago.

"Oh, man!" Booth griped as we came closer to a stronger smell and covered his nose and mouth. Further into the alley, the garbage smelled even stronger because there was more of it. There was something underneath it, too – something recognizable, despite that I was trying to breathe shallowly. "How bad does garbage have to stink to cover the smell of a dead body?"

"Well, humans are organic," I pointed out, answering his question. "And they decompose slowly. Bugs and animals help. But the quantity of the trash and the various compounds that have to chemically react to break down, as well as any possible catalysts, can all combine as factors that…" Booth stopped mid-step, planted his foot, and spun around to face me. I looked up at him quietly and then ducked my head, walking around him. "You asked," I muttered.

"I think the victim was a minor." Saroyan disclosed, her lips pursed thoughtfully.

Now that we were only feet from her, we could see that she was kneeling over a completely different sort of waste. Thrown in with the contents of the dumpsters had been a _person_. A very, very _dead_ person. The body was partially wrapped with some thick, black material in a way that made me guess it had been peeled back when it was found. Although badly decomposed, there was still a lot of surprisingly-hydrated flesh. _I bet it's thanks to that wrap._

"Okay, well…" Booth clapped his hands. I noticed he kept his shoes well away from the trash, as well. I sighed deeply and resigned myself to committing arson on my own footwear as I advanced to the body, lowering myself into a stable balance with a lot of weight going to my toes and calves. "If the rest of you agree, this falls under FBI jurisdiction." By 'the rest of us,' he probably only meant Brennan and I – since Hodgins wasn't really a 'remains' specialist – but the entomologist would probably not object to our ruling.

Brennan placed a covered hand over the pelvis. The skin was decayed and sunken, sallow. Some of the bone was visible. "It's a male, and yes, an adolescent." she confirmed. I didn't want to check, but since the victim was still clothed, I was willing to guess from the fairly-preserved state of him that anyone capable of undressing corpses could've been able to tell that. Luckily, the flesh parts would not be my responsibility. That would be Saroyan's privilege.

"I think his neck is snapped," I stated with an odd degree of flippant concern in my voice. I frowned and moved my hand as if to touch my throat before I thought better of it (gloves and all). _Well, it's not like he's feeling it now._

Hodgins held up something small between tweezers. It was probably a bug. I tried not to think about all of the bugs in the trash that could've been crawling over my feet, maybe up my pants. "Flatworms, necrophagous flies and beetles… yeah, he's been garbage for about three weeks." He started to drop an insect into a little evidence jar, but felt the unamused stares. Looking up guiltily, he awkwardly cleared his throat. "I… I didn't mean that the way it sounded…"

Brennan was the only one who hadn't started to give him a disappointed glare for his phrasing. She didn't even acknowledge that it had been a problem. She and I switched positions so that she could see the top half of the torso with more ease. I was better with bare bones and had a lot less experience with body parts that still looked like body parts.

"The fractures are to the cranium, sphenoid, and occipital regions. The neck's broken," she affirmed my diagnosis, "And the femur is shattered."

I envisioned the body as just a skeleton and shuddered. Just the idea of having all of those injuries made me sympathetic. "Could they be a result of heavy impact damage?" I asked thoughtfully, craning my neck up and looking along the side of the building behind Saroyan. If he'd just been tossed from a window and into the dumpsters several stories below, it _might_ have done it. If the dumpsters had been emptied recently and the body crashed into the metal bottom, then there wouldn't have been much of a cushion.

She saw where I was looking and followed my eyes up to the open gaps in the side of the structure. It looked like the space had been in the process of being renovated – there were still unblocked openings where windows were supposed to have been placed. "That's a very strong possibility."

"Hey, what's that in his hand?" Hodgins asked, his eyes lighting up excitedly. He pushed himself in next to Saroyan, who rolled her eyes and scooted out of his way. The man didn't even seem to notice, just went for the clasped fingers, stiffened and locked in place by rigor mortis and still, atrophying muscles. He took the tweezers to it gently, pushing against the fingers just enough to free the evidence.

He worked it out of the literal death grip with the gentleness of a child touching a butterfly. It was crumped, thin, and broken down, much like the victim, but the color was dark and the item small.

"It's organic," he declared, shifting it from the dead hand and into his own open, waiting palm. Although it was just a mess of organic stuff, Hodgins still stood up with it as if he was carrying fine china.

"Whatever it is, he brought it with him from the crime scene," Brennan told Hodgins as he was very careful to place it in an evidence jar. Putting it in a bag would have squished it even further than it had already been.

Saroyan looked down the alley. It would take a long time to pick up everything that was spilled. Although morally, I had to be glad no one had been hurt, I still privately bemoaned that there _hadn't_ been an explosion to take out this filth with the poor convertible.

"How much of this are you gonna need?" She asked Hodgins, holding her hands out like she wanted to wipe them off.

Hodgins' answering grin should have been a warning sign that he was about to say something weird again. "The whole, disgusting shebang," he answered – which wouldn't have been weird or inaccurate, if he hadn't said it with a huge smile and a boyish giggle.

 _Okay, I know I'm a teenager who investigates death, but even I'm not that weird._

Booth made a horrified face as he realized how much longer he was going to have to supervise the scene. "Everything?!" He repeated, choking.

Brennan sighed but nodded her agreement. "Everything," she confirmed, standing up and looking down the length of the corpse as she considered it. She was probably debating the best way to get it back to the Jeffersonian with its forensic integrity intact.

"And, uh, if you have Febreeze, you might want to bring that, too." I contributed matter-of-factly, then made the huge mistake of trying to cover my nose with the back of my wrist… which wouldn't have been a big deal, except for that in doing so, I brought my hands much closer to my face. Hands that had the smell of rubber from the gloves and that had been touching a dead person and the pool of trash surrounding said dead person. "Oh, God, why?!" I gagged again, shoving my face into the inside of my elbow.

* * *

While Zach stayed on the corpse like a fly on fruit, Brennan and I summarized the crime scene for him. Since he had been unavailable when the call came (Hodgins wasn't willing to wait while he woke up and prepared to leave), he hadn't been able to meet us out there. I wasn't too surprised, but I did kind of miss not being the one to lug around the duffel of equipment and taking Polaroids.

"He was wrapped in a shroud?" Zach repeated with a distasteful grimace as he gently moved the bones to look at them on the left side.

Brennan stood in a position on the opposite side of the table, almost at the upper corner while she carefully removed remaining flesh and muscle from the collar. Once that was off the bones in a way that wouldn't damage them any further, Saroyan would do her thing with the icky parts. I preferred the bones. They were cleaner than flesh and fats and fluids.

"Angela's analyzing the stains on the cloth while Hodgins figures out what they're made of." Brennan didn't so much as look at her intern while she confirmed it. I had always admired their abilities of multitasking so seamlessly.

The control panel made its cheery bleeping noise while someone let themselves up. The footsteps and the gait told me who it was before she spoke, and I moved around the table so that my back wasn't to her. I didn't trust her enough to not be able to watch her for very long.

Saroyan brought with her some evidence from the pathological material removed from the cranium. There was still some sinew and thick muscle on it, and until the skull could be reconstructed in light of the kid's head being smashed by his fall, my money was on getting his ID from the dental x-rays.

As if she'd read my mind, the toxicologist-slash-pathologist set her tray down on a nearby equipment table, out of the way of the cleaning tools Brennan was using, and she took a good look at the progress made on the body. "No finger pads left for prints," she sighed upon seeing the mangled state of the victim's hands. "How are we on dental records?"

Had she just been asking in general, I would've answered and been done with it, but she very specifically targeted her question at Zach. I knew it was a dumb thing to get upset about, but the assumption that he had done that job irked me. There were plenty of other things I could've been doing while someone else took dental x-rays, so I wasn't just automatically dismissed as useless, but my temper and emotions weren't quite willing to listen to reason. I was getting sick of being easily angered at the smallest things.

I cleared my throat and cocked my head, tightening my pinch on the edge of a Polaroid. I was working on laminating the photographs for safekeeping, but the quiet hum was almost unnoticeable unless someone consciously listened for it. "I've already taken and sent those to the FBI. As soon as there's a match, I'll know."

More accurately, I had sent them to Booth. I'd found that the process went faster when he was the one asking for things. If I said that I was requesting them as a minor, then I'd have gotten nothing – well, maybe I'd have gotten some skeptical questions about where I'd gotten dental x-rays. If I went for something from the federal databases as a Jeffersonian employee, they got back to me eventually, but for the most part, the Medico-Legal team used Booth as a conduit. He passed on information, and because it came from him instead of some nerd scientists, people walked a bit faster.

Saroyan nodded to me and didn't say anything about my productivity, merely casting her eyes down and briefly appearing to wish she hadn't asked in the first place. Reaching behind her with her right hand, she found the tray and tapped the top of a sealed translucent container. "Multiple shards of leaded glass were embedded in the remaining tissue, as well as multiple contusions congruent with a swan dive onto a hard surface."

Brennan's carefully-controlled hands stilled when she heard the analysis. Looking up curiously as she remembered something, she put down the piece of bone and the bone-friendly archaeological tool on the locked-wheeled table. With a motion of her hand, she beckoned for Zach to walk up to the front of the body.

"Take a look at the upper spine," she instructed him.

Zach bent down at the waist slightly so that he wouldn't have to move the skull's remains to see the bones from the angle she wanted him to look at. He still had to shift the clavicle and move the hyoid to the side. "Weighted impact against the scapula… and the clavicle." He peered at it intently to look for more bones showing that sort of damage.

"He was struck?" Saroyan translated, crossing her arms and holding one out, bent at the elbow.

"Yes," the anthropologist confirmed, "but not hard enough to kill."

I fed another photograph through the lamination machine. Once enough of it had been sucked in, I let go of the end and let the machine pull some of its own weight. "Alright, hypothesizing here," I forewarned, knowing that Brennan wasn't a big fan. I popped my knuckles while my hands were free. "Blunt force trauma, glass in the flesh, injuries from a fall? What if he was hit with the unidentified object and it sent him through a window?"

"Hodgins will test the makeup of the glass and compare it to commercial and industrial uses. Then we can revisit the theory," Saroyan permitted amicably. For once, I didn't feel like I was being contested. I knew it wasn't worth serious consideration without the evidence to back it up.

A guard greeting Booth made all four of us look away from the body and towards the front of the lab. The automated doors slid smoothly shut after the FBI agent, whose head was down as he picked up the top sheets of paper in a folder, skimming through them briefly.

"Private garbage hauler," he called up, sliding his clearance card to come up onto the platform. I still wasn't entirely sure what strings Brennan had had to pull to get him one, since it was against the rules for anyone who wasn't employee of the Jeffersonian to have one. "They aren't real strict about their routes. Driver says he can't be sure where he picked the victim up."

Saroyan folded her hands in front of her, arms straightening. It was subtle, but she was pleased to see Booth. Having him around made her feel more comfortable with either me or Brennan (possibly both of us). While I understood feeling safe with the agent around, it made me narrow my eyes at her arms. _If you're not comfy around us, maybe start being more cooperative_.

"No visible tats or track marks," she reported to Booth as he stepped up, the document from the truck held down at his side.

A flash of irritation ran through me again and I pushed the next photo into the laminator with a little more aggression than the machine called for. Why wouldn't she have told _us_ that? The point of having multiple scientists in the lab was to _share_ information, to _collaborate._

Brennan looked between the two when a nonverbal communication passed between former flames. "You sound surprised," she commented as a thinly-veiled question.

Booth carelessly tossed the folder onto the lower shelf of the equipment rack. He stuck his thumbs through his belt loops and rocked on his heels. "Well, it's pretty obvious, Bones," he replied pointedly. "It's either a junkie or a hustler."

It seemed like they were trying to work in reverse. "Wait, what?" I picked up the newest shining photo and felt the warmth between my fingers. The new layer of plastic quickly cooled. "You can't know that. We don't have proof to support either of those habits."

Saroyan tilted her head to me while smiling at Booth. Her expression wasn't rude, but it made me think she thought I needed something simple explained to me, and she thought her opinions of having a minor in the lab were being reaffirmed. _Here we go,_ I sighed.

"Not many kids from the suburbs end up rotting in alleyways surrounded by garbage." As if she hadn't just said something totally not-cool to say in most situations, she smiled at me. "Fun factoid from the front lines."

 _Excuse me? I've been on the front lines. I_ _ **lived**_ _the front lines._

"That's your reasoning?" I demanded. Just because someone's body was dumped in trash didn't mean anything about the victim. Sure, I would easily buy that it spoke about the killer – or the disposer, at least, if there was a difference – but I was fairly certain that the body on the exam table hadn't had much of a choice in what had happened to him. "What about Warren Granger?" I turned to Booth, putting my hands on my hips.

Booth's confident smile that he was sharing with the pathologist slipped away in mournful respect. "Warren Granger was an anomaly," he said softly. That case had touched us all – except for Saroyan, because she hadn't been there. "Chances are, this wasn't a cancer-ridden kid playing superhero."

I pursed my lips tightly. He was confusing victimology with disposal methods, and Saroyan had started it, and I wanted to shove them both off of the platform until they could approach the situation rationally instead of with preconceived notions about who the victim had been based on those misappropriated generalizations. Before I could say something like that out loud, we were interrupted. As inconvenient as peoples' timing was becoming, it was possibly for the best – I wouldn't have worded it as diplomatically or empirically as I perhaps should have.

"Hey, guys!" Angela's cheery voice came down from upwards. Bewildered, Saroyan quickly looked around before she checked the catwalks and relaxed. The brunette waved, leaning over the railing of one of the walkways. "Wanna see something cool?"

* * *

The forensic artist preened. She didn't do that too often, so I knew that this was going to be good. I took up a stance in the middle of the room, behind Saroyan, Angela, and Brennan and not far from Booth, raising my chin to watch the computer monitor her tablet was connected to.

"I assume you're familiar with the Shroud of Turin?" Angela prefaced, turning on the system with a smirk on her face, reflected by the black monitors of technology around her.

Booth nodded shortly and answered without waiting. "Image of Christ's face on the inside of a burial cloth."

Although I had no idea what this would have to do with the facial reconstruction, I went along with the conversation and scoffed slightly at the reference. _Sounds to me like Jesus on a tortilla,_ I privately thought. I had too much respect for Booth and his faith to say something disrespectful like that out loud. He still believed in immaculate conception, thanks to God and Mary and their strange relationship.

"Right," Saroyan teased. "Booth's a good Catholic boy."

"It was revealed to be a hoax," Brennan calmly offered her input while sending Angela a curious look, wondering as I was what the relevance was to the more pressing matter at hand.

Booth heard her. "It wasn't a hoax," he defended, leaning against the wall.

The novelist raised her eyebrows like she was talking to a stubborn teenager. "Okay," she said, unconvinced. "Whatever you want to believe…" It occurred to me that she was goading him when she used that tone. Booth didn't rise to take the bait, although I was left unsure why she would intentionally try to get his attention like that.

"This is no hoax," Angela declared, and surely would've incited a lecture on the debunking of the shroud from Brennan if she hadn't specified that she was talking about what was collected from the crime scene. Her program opened up to a gridded sort of three-dimensional background, on top of which appeared a stained skull. "On the fabric covering John Doe's skull, there are tissue stains around the eye sockets, the nose, and the mouth." A black square covered the front of the skull, and the computer generated a pooling of reddish, coppery-colored liquid that seeped through the representation of the wrap. "This is essentially a photo negative of his features."

"Are you saying you have enough to assemble a face?" Saroyan questioned incredulously.

The computer program focused in on the negative, rotated and reflected it, and then found points of comparison, making thin green boxes around them. The inside of the boxes flashed an even paler green before the depiction of the skull was deleted and replaced with a frontal image generated by the reversal of the negative, and the missing details were filled in – white skin from race of his skeleton, dark hair from hair fibers, and Angela chose to substitute green eyes so that they weren't just a creepy white until we found out what color they were actually supposed to be.

Standing proudly, Angela brought it up in larger zoom. "I call it the Shroud of Montenegro." _Yep. Definitely boasting._ "I used computer tomography to create x-ray slices of the underlying facial architecture. Selective laser centering allowed me to map un-imprinted areas. Skin tone and hair color were extrapolated based on Dr. Saroyan's data."

Facial reconstructions weren't always how we got our identifications of victims, but this was one of the coolest ways it had ever been done. It was very convenient that the person who disposed of the body had thoughtlessly aided in our identification process.

"Guess we won't need the dental results now," I mentioned, idly considering how pissed the disposer would be if I happened to let slip in the interrogation room how helpful they had been.

The face that remained was a little creepy in the same way that waxy CGI models were, but it looked close enough to a real version for software to run accurate analyses on the markers. The specific model was moved to the side, and on the right half of the monitor, Angela set another, Internet-centered program running, scanning through different images faster than I could blink.

"I'm no expert," Brennan admitted pointedly, "But he sure doesn't look like a street kid." I saw what she meant. The victim looked handsome and well-groomed, but kids who lived on the street, no matter how resourceful they were, usually couldn't maintain that sort of appearance without getting help from other people – namely, people who had their own access to clean running water and were willing to share.

"I'm running our facial reconstruction through the Missing and Exploited Persons database." Angela gestured to her largest monitor over her desk and laid down her tablet on the table. Brushing her hair back and smoothing it down, she walked away with clicking sandals, heading over to her desk.

Faces flashed over the computer rapidly. By the time I had processed the color of one's hair, I was looking into different eyes. They flickered by like lightning – and even at the speed they were rolling by, there were still more.

This went on for barely twenty seconds before Saroyan raised an eyebrow and stated in surprise, "That's a lot of missing and exploited kids."

Brennan sent her a sideways glance, decided that the pathologist didn't sound like she was making any particular point, and she nodded, letting her disappointment show. There were a lot of families who were missing loved ones, and a lot of scared adolescents out there somewhere without a clue that they were wanted back home. It made me wonder how many had left because they had to, or because they weren't safe with their families, the way I hadn't been safe with mine.

"These are just the locals." Brennan pointed out the filter parameters on the edge of the monitor.

I looked at her surreptitiously. Her face was carefully clear but for the furrow of her eyebrows where she was holding back a frown. Sometimes I forgot that she had had negligent and abusive foster parents as well. Luckily, she had been fifteen when her parents left and almost sixteen by the time Russ took off, so she hadn't been in the system for nearly as long as I had. I was glad. No one deserved to be treated the way we had been.

Saroyan's surprise surprised me. How could she be surprised, with her worldview? She seemed so straightforward and candid most of the time. Her no-nonsense bluntness was different from Goodman's politically-correct perspective, and it was one of the few things I allowed myself to openly appreciate about her.

"You spent a long time in New York," I reminded her, crossing my arms and looking at her upper back while she watched the database scroll through another hundred minors in under sixty seconds. "Haven't you seen cases like this? Threatened, abused, harassed, neglected minors ending up dead because their luck ran out?"

"I've seen it a few times," she answered with an honest glance over her shoulder at me. "But, on that note, we should narrow the search to kids in the foster system." _Wait, what?_ She gave me a nod of acknowledgment. "Good thinking."

Angela, who had been putting her hair up in a low ponytail since putting down her handheld, looked up when Saroyan motioned to her. Dropping her hands from her hair and tugging on the hem of her shirt, she walked between the female scientists to pick up her device again and input the command.

"That is _not_ what I was saying," I told Saroyan with a frustrated protest. I had been making a comment on the number of missing kids, just like she had. When had that turned into a statement on the foster system?

My mentor didn't look irritated, but she did look a little bit offended. Still, she tried to give Saroyan the chance to explain her seemingly sudden decision. "Why do you assume this boy was in the foster system?" She asked slowly.

"Because statistically, that's where this boy comes from." Saroyan replied without batting an eye at her, making a rolling motion with her wrist for Angela to go ahead and change the search criteria.

Before the brunette could do more than just pull up the filters, Brennan was arguing, and Angela stopped, cringing, _literally_ in the middle of their argument. I felt sorry for her. I never wanted to be in an argument between Brennan and someone else, but this had to be especially bad, since Saroyan was technically Angela's boss.

"It's far too early to start narrowing our focus," Brennan contested, crossing her arms defensively subconsciously. I wasn't the only one whose nerves were getting prodded and poked at.

Saroyan stared back at Brennan when she heard the challenge, and flatly contradicted, "Runaways, street kids, foster system."

Angela sent Brennan a pleading look. Her best friend sighed and flicked her hand irately, but didn't take it out on the artist. "Dr. Saroyan's the boss," she deferred tersely, her jaw tight and tense. It was obvious that she wasn't very happy to be deferring to someone else's opinion, especially not one that would single out people who were in the same place we'd been.

The artist did as she was told and specified key words in the search. There wasn't an outward sign that the program had accepted the input, but the filter box went away and the faces kept changing, comparing, contrasting facial markers to the digital reconstruction of the victim from the alley. The unsettling number didn't bother me quite as much now that I had another reason to be aggravated – one that was much physically closer to me.

I sent Booth a glower. _She's your ex,_ I accused with my eyes, turning my head away from him when he noticed and put his hands up innocently. Of course he wasn't responsible for Saroyan being insensitive, but he could've spoken up instead of leaving the foster kids to fend for themselves. He knew it was a touchy subject for us.

As the silence commenced, Saroyan put her head down. Her silky hair brushed her upper back in the dip of her dress's cut before she looked up and quietly tried to mend the bridge. Without knowing what it was made of, she had been able to smell the smoke as it burned. "I've autopsied a lot of dead kids. Car accidents, drug overdoses, drownings – fine, it's a broad search. Kid in a dumpster? It's a runaway, street kid, or foster system."

Brennan looked to Booth for help disagreeing with Saroyan's assessment. While I normally would've accepted the statistics, this was just too wired for me. What did it say that foster kids were known for being found dead in dumpsters? That they were _trash?_ I was unapologetically rebellious to _that_ statistic.

Booth shifted like an uncomfortable guinea pig being stared at through PetSmart glass. "Cam's right, Bones," he said, making a pained expression as he did so, knowing he would come to regret it shortly.

I couldn't believe he'd just said that, just agreed with the implication. How could he back up that sort of assumption when both of his partners had come from that background? How could he preach about how important family is and how he's never going to let his _daughter_ be on her own and then go and say something like _that?_ I fumed.

"No," I raised my voice competitively, my hands in fists so tight that the muscles trembled. "That's _wrong._ It's an unfair generalization based on the stereotypes of minors without stable homes." So my mom didn't want me. So I'd been abused. So I was violent. So _what?_ I had to believe that those were just coincidences, parts of my personality that weren't influenced by my environment. If I started believing that Saroyan _or_ Booth were making legitimate points, then I'd have to start questioning whether I was right to have ambitions or if I was destined to end up like the victim – dead and decomposing in a freaking _dumpster_ , because I wasn't worth the respect of a grave.

(The fact that I wanted to be cremated rather than buried wasn't important for the feelings I was struggling to express.)

"Got it," Angela called unnecessarily loudly when her computer stopped scanning. It left the photograph of an attractive-looking boy my age on the monitor against a dark, gridded digital background. "Dylan Crane, seventeen."

Saroyan pointed towards the computer, refined and graceful in her gestures, and it made me angrier. How could she take it so lightly? "Yet we still have results. This was why I was appointed, Miss Kirkland: to streamline the process."

Then Angela kept talking. "Honors student from a nice neighborhood in Alexandria."

I swore I could hear the smirk in Brennan's voice. "Oops," she remarked, feigning earnestness.

"Hm…" I unclenched my fists and told myself to calm down. At least Saroyan was wrong. That would be a hit to her ego that she certainly deserved. "Guess good kids can end up in dumpsters after all."

"He disappeared three weeks ago with his girlfriend, Kelly Morris-" In the process of trying to distract the feud by relaying a summary of the report, Angela paused and sighed. "…Who is in the foster system."

 _Well, that victory was short-lived._ Was it possible to physically _feel_ blood pressure rising? Because if so, then that was what I was feeling.

In light of her evident correctness – which made Brennan and I look doubly wrong for being quick to rudely shoot her down – Saroyan seemed to think that the argument was done. She'd won, and that was that.

"Good. There we go." She turned around and held her hands in front of her, not paying me any mind. "I guess your first move is to find Kelly Morris." She told Booth with an expression that suggested she didn't envy him his task.

While I tried to telekinetically make her bleed, glaring as if she'd personally assaulted me, Booth was already taking out his phone and flashing Saroyan a slightly-scolding gaze. "No," he corrected emphatically, "The first move is to inform the Cranes that we just found their son."

* * *

Not long after I started spending more time at the lab, I found that the upstairs loft was _the_ place to go. I loved it. It had vending machines, furniture, and the quiet tranquility of a library when there weren't other people there. I'd used it as a hideaway when I needed some privacy but didn't have the time or opportunity to leave the Jeffersonian. It served its purpose well, and it still did sometimes, but it was being used more and more often for other reasons, which meant that my new 'private space' was becoming the guest room I had been occupying in Brennan's apartment since summer.

Very little could surprise me anymore at the lab. I mean, I'd gotten to help throw an entire pig frozen with nitrogen into a wood chipper for the sake of scientific inquiry when I officially joined the Silly Science Squad. The name was Booth's idea – Hodgins had originally wanted to call him, Zach, and me the 'United Scientists to Sublimate Responsibility,' but when Booth pointed out that that acronym spelled out USSR, the idea was nixed. (I'd thought it was funny.) Inviting the parents of a murder victim up to the lab and then introducing them to _my_ – erm, _the_ – loft was one of the few things I hadn't considered might happen at some point.

Dylan's parents looked like the typical American parents. Had their son not been found dead in a dumpster pile, they'd have been the photogenic American family seen on brochures. Mr. Crane was bespectacled and had thick brown hair and matching eyes, while his mother was of slighter frame and her green eyes were in bright contrast with her strawberry-blonde hair. As grieving parents, they fit the brochures from a therapist's office – the husband with his arm around his wife's back, the woman crying into her hands, the man's glasses fogging.

"Are you positive?" Mrs. Crane whimpered through congestion.

I swallowed. This part always made me uncomfortable. I just didn't like dealing with crying adults, and the reactions to me had been… less than pleasant… enough times for me to associate meeting parents with personal stress.

"We don't need to identify him?" Mr. Crane offered almost desperately. I thought it was a front so that he could see his child one more time. Even I fidgeted then in discomfort and sympathy. It was better if he didn't. "To make sure, I mean?"

His wife put her hand on his knee and looked straight to the FBI agent mournfully. "I need to see my son," she implored. "You understand?"

They put Booth in a very uncomfortable position. Were he to say no, he'd have seemed like an unreasonable bad guy; if he said yes, then it was almost just as cruel to permit them to see Dylan's remains, what with the way he ended up being found. The agent looked temporarily at a loss.

I cleared my throat and shifted forward to the edge of the loveseat. I had claimed it for myself, and although there was room for another person to squeeze in and cuddle, I didn't really come across as the cuddling type. "Ma'am," I started to say carefully, unsure how blunt to be. Sometimes grief made people stupid and they needed things spelled out for them. I didn't like being treated poorly, but it was better if the parents were pissed at me than at the agent running point on the case. "I'm a forensic consultant. I specialize in anthropology," I explained softly, gentling my tone and taking the same voice I used when approaching an iffier subject with Parker. If I didn't handle it well, then the kid would notice I was steering the discussion.

I noticed Booth giving me a discreet, thankful glance. Mr. Crane was busy frowning and shaking his head, so he didn't notice. "I don't understand the significance of that," he said, his voice low and a little gravelly. He was trying not to cry. I was relieved for that composure, because it made me a little more comfortable. If that made me a terrible person, then so be it.

 _I didn't have a plan for this…_ "We're called upon when visual observation is insufficient for identification." I phrased it as prettily as I could. The alternative was to say _you wouldn't recognize your son because he's a rotting carcass._

Luckily for everyone involved, the explanation did not have to get that detailed. What I'd said had struck a chord, and Dylan's father went all ashen-faced. I worried he was going to slouch over and pass out. His mother made a short keening noise that someone probably could've heard from the floor below. I grimaced and pulled my shoulders in a little tighter, taking out a wallet-sized school ID image and reaching out towards the parents. I pushed the photo onto the table and then gave it a little flick in their direction. Maybe it would have been more polite to just hand it to them, but I didn't want to get that close.

"We've identified Dylan beyond reasonable doubt through both forensic means and dental records," I delicately promised. That way, they wouldn't feel as strong of a need to torture themselves by asking to see Dylan's remains. The boy was not going to be having an open-casket funeral, that was for sure. "That's him, right?"

Mrs. Crane lifted the photograph and held it as if it were her son itself. I doubted I was going to be getting it back. "That's Dylan," she answered desolately, trembling and locking eyes with the bright-eyed youth in the picture.

Mr. Crane sat forward suddenly and put his arm out. Violently, I leaned back in my seat and shuffled my legs further to the side, preventing him from touching me. It created a hell of a scene, but the grieving mother didn't notice, and aside from looking dazedly appalled for at least ten seconds, Dylan's dad didn't have anything to say about it. He shifted back slowly, unthreateningly. Booth grimaced and tried to act like he hadn't seen anything awkward happen. He's not a very good actor all of the time.

In place of comforting human tactility, Mr. Crane twisted his hands together and popped his knuckles. "How did he die?" He asked me miserably.

Those sorts of questions usually made things worse for the family, but having been in a position where I didn't know how my foster family had perished, I knew that it was better to just get it out in the open than to let it hide and fester. "He fell," I summarized sensitively. "From about the height of a five-story building." Of course, there was only so much sensitivity that could be packed into that sentence, as my brain first went towards suicide. It was the addition of the blunt force trauma that sent our hypotheses in alternative directions, but the Cranes didn't need a play-by-play of our discoveries.

Booth crossed his arms and leaned over his legs, elbows on his knees. "Is there any reason to believe that your son was depressed?" He inquired. Just his voice sounded more comfortable, more reassuring than mine had. It made me frustrated. Why couldn't I mimic that? I could lie and feign annoyance like a pro, but I couldn't seem to get compassion down in the same way. I didn't want to consider that it was one of those things you had to grow up with to fully understand.

"Dylan?" Mrs. Crane kept crying, so her husband answered while he massaged circles into her back. "No." He swiped his fingers over his eyes behind his glasses. "He was a smart, happy kid."

I figured most parents probably thought their children were happy, even when they weren't. Kids were crafty, and fragile.

"Problems at school?" Booth followed up with the usual queries when something like a suicide case came up. I hadn't been on any of those with him, but I knew the routine. Due diligence requires that law enforcement confirm there isn't reason to suspect foul play before ruling a death as a suicide. Identifying likely causes of such an act is part of the process. "You know, spending too much time on the internet? Anything like that?"

Mrs. Crane shook her head while blowing her nose loudly into a Kleenex tissue.

Mr. Crane chuckled dryly while making the same gesture as his spouse. "His whole life centered around this girl he was seeing," he related with a perfected tone of parental exasperation.

 _Someone didn't like the girlfriend,_ I realized, raising my eyebrows.

I wanted to say her name to see if there would be a reaction. "This girl was Kelly Morris, yes?"

Both of the Cranes were unable to help the disgruntled expressions on their faces. Mrs. Crane's went to fury for a microsecond, but then it was gone, and it could've been imagined. It equally could've been the byproduct of the amalgam of horrible emotions she was feeling. Either way, there was no way either of them could expect us to believe that they had no issues with Dylan's choice in girlfriend.

 _Score for Kirkland._

"Yes." The shifting focus helped Dylan's mother to calm down. She rubbed at her red nose, her eyes dry and puffy, and swallowed thickly several times. "I suppose you read the Missing Persons report."

 _Well, yeah, that's kind of what they're there for._ Booth and I both nodded, uncertain where the conversation was going to lead.

The man's face was tight, his lips pressed firmly in a disapproving line just to one side of a scowl. "So you know Kelly's in a _foster situation?"_ He checked. The way he said 'foster situation' made me think he considered it to be on par with being a parolee.

I sat straighter and distanced myself as far as the loveseat permitted. "Yes," I admitted rigidly, attempting to give him the benefit of the doubt and not go off on him. Saroyan was bad enough; I didn't need to be picking fights with three people in one day about how they viewed foster children. "But I'm not sure why that's the first aspect of her that you jump to." If I'd been Kelly, I'd have been rightfully pissed off that my foster status was more important than anything actually noteworthy about me. Forcefully, I shoved down the acidic feeling of anger in my chest. "How would you characterize Dylan's relationship with her?"

Mrs. Crane broke into a small, watery smile. "He adored that girl."

"She never spent as much time with us as he did with her," Mr. Crane agreed, displeased. While his wife was mourning Dylan, he was lamenting the woes of his son's girlfriend. I thought that point was pretty obvious to make; I would definitely be spending more time with my significant other than with my significant other's parents, for God's sake.

"She has a little brother," the blonde recalled, biting her lip. "Dylan bought him some toys for his last birthday."

"Have you heard from her at all since Dylan disappeared?"

Relief was mixed with regret when Mr. Crane's shoulders slumped and he responded, "No."

"To be honest-" Mrs. Crane cut herself off warily when she seemed to second-guess what she had been about to say. She looked to her husband nervously and he gave her a gentle nudge in the side, so the woman went on. "-We had been hoping they ran away together."

 _What?!_ That went against everything I had been watching them say and emote about Kelly.

The surprise must've shown on my face, because Booth slid in the next question while I replayed the statement in my head, sure that I must've been missing something. "Why would they do that?"

The father put his head down. "We told Dylan to stop seeing her," he answered, lifting his chin and looking back semi-defiantly at Booth. It was as if he had suddenly realized that he might be being judged for his parenting skills and now felt the need to defend them.

"Why?" I wondered, fearing that I wasn't going to like the answer.

Mrs. Crane fisted her hands in the Kleenex and the hem of her skirt. Lo and behold, my prediction came true when she explained with a piteous note. "Dylan met her at Harbor Plaza, where the street kids hang out."

My face must've just completely shut down, because I didn't have to struggle to hide what I was feeling anymore. I also didn't give away anything else. It was just like I suddenly couldn't be bothered to show my emotions because I just didn't give a damn if they understood me or not. I didn't _want_ them to have the privilege of being privy to how I felt.

Mr. Crane rolled his eyes. "Dylan was getting ready to go to MIT. She's already dropped out of high school," he complained. "The life we provided him didn't prepare him for a girl like Kelly."

 _Like what?! A foster child?!_ I was so sick of this _stupid_ stigma. That was a flimsy, pathetic excuse for the _real_ reason – the Cranes' reasoning wasn't on their academics, it was on Kelly's background. She could've probably been applying to UC Berkeley and they'd have reacted the same way. Nothing real ever mattered. Everything had to be just so; they had to be able to see what they wanted. Nothing else, no one else mattered but their fantasy in which they were the heroes that rescued their son.

"You know, not every relationship is reliant on the same ambitions held between the two," I mildly reminded them. My thrashing feelings were anything _but_ mild, yet attacking their excuses made me feel vicious and proud.

Mrs. Crane looked right at me. "Whatever happened to my son," she gravely accused, "I _know_ it happened because of Kelly."

Booth held a hand out in my direction to try to calm me down. He should have known before he even tried that there was no point. No meaningless hand waving was going to negate the injustices being hurled at Kelly Morris, and any injustice done to her on the grounds of being a foster child was an injustice to me, as well, along with thousands of people who had never deserved it. People were surprised when we acted out and surprised if we didn't. We either never got the benefit of the doubt or we were pushed into secondary deviance before we'd even had the chance to make a first offense.

Booth adopted his calm, reassuring, _everything will be okay_ voice. "We're gonna find her, and we're gonna talk to her," he assuaged, sending me a knowing gaze. _Talk, that's all,_ he might as well have said.

I hoped he knew that I didn't blame _him_ for anything that the Cranes were saying. I was still a little agitated by what he and Saroyan had talked about, but even the pathologist looked well-reasoned compared to these sons of bitches. Similarly, I hoped he realized that it wasn't his fault I didn't reign in my temper; I doubted there was anything he could've said or done that would have convinced me to step down.

"Miss Kirkland, I can see that you think we're being hard on Kelly." Mr. Crane allowed with a dip of his head. "But my son-" he paused and met my eyes again, his hands in fists in his lap. He was beseeching for me to understand, to align myself with a belief that would state that _I_ was responsible for McVicar slaughtering Rosie and Nick. "My son was a good kid with his whole life ahead of him."

I glared at him fiercely. "And for all you know, so was she," I spat with revulsion, raising my voice and standing up. I wasn't going to stay in the vicinity of them any longer, wasn't going to try to treat them with decency and kindness and understanding if they were so incapable of granting the same rights and courtesies to Kelly and me, just because our guardians weren't biologically related to us. "I was in the foster system, too, but I'm working with the FBI, so clearly I'm not exactly what you'd call a deadbeat. Expand your perspectives, you pathetic bastards. There are no parents worse than those that think parenting is all about blood, and no humans worse than those who would refuse to give someone half a chance solely because of where they come from."

* * *

 **A/N: Yay, there wasn't three months between updates this time!**

 **Responses to reviews: I am honestly very shocked by the number of people who responded last time and who knew the show I was considering crossing over with. It's a great surprise!**

 **At this moment, it's unclear to Holly whether or not Cam knows that she and Booth are related, but she's not willing to be the one who tells in case she doesn't.**

 **Thank you to everyone who reviewed! They always make my day!**

 **Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	13. The Boy in the Shroud, Part Two

"Kelly Morris's foster mother is gonna meet us in my office," Booth tried to make conversation in the S.U.V., but it didn't work. Brennan was staring out the window and sulking, although she wouldn't admit that's what she was doing, and I was still scowling at my reflection in the rearview mirror and having my internal temper tantrum.

Brennan's shoulders dropped as she sighed. "Okay." That was all the answer that Booth got.

Booth looked over at her helplessly and tried to keep going. "She says Kelly took off a couple weeks ago with most of her belongings," he continued, floundering like a fish out of water.

Brennan sighed heavily again, this time making an audible noise. Booth looked at me for help in the mirror. I just lifted my shoulders semi-aggressively. I couldn't say anything in a voice that wouldn't be inflected with anger directed at someone. I thought I'd left the drama of being a foster child behind a long time ago. I had never been a foster child in the Jeffersonian. I'd been Booth's ward, sure, but that had a much different connotation. Now, suddenly, it's all back. What if Cam is coloring Hodgins, Angela, and Zach's perspectives of me with the throwaway comments or the offensive generalizations?

Booth bravely tried to take on the matter himself. "You okay, Bones?" He flinched back like he was waiting for her to snap back at him.

She didn't. She just sounded defeated, and that made me even angrier – at Cam, and at Dylan's parents. "I was a foster child." She said quietly, looking down at her lap instead of at Booth. Usually when he was driving, she made the effort to look at him, engaging him respectively even if he couldn't do the same for her while driving. "So was Holly."

"Technically speaking," I muttered, crossing my arms and looking down, my hair covering my neck and falling down to the sides of my face. "I still am."

"Yeah… I know," Booth said knowingly, nodding slowly like he'd half-expected the answer that he got. He was a lot more aware of other people's issues than he liked to let on.

Brennan's cheek was sucked in for a second before she asked in confusion, "Did people always assume the worst of me?" Her voice was insecure and saddened. She was so much better than the accusations that Cam had been throwing. No wonder she was offended. You can't ever forget about it, even if you do outgrow it or leave it behind.

It was Booth's turn to sigh and he delicately tried to approach the situation with a careful hand, even while he lacked the firsthand experience. "You know, I know that you hate psychology, but these people – they just lost their son." I couldn't say that Booth wouldn't be able to empathize with them, even if he wouldn't have a claim to how Brennan or I felt with the decisions being made about foster children. "They need to blame someone."

"Why not blame the foster kids?" I asked snidely, belligerently staring out the window to the left of the car. A person was walking their terrier outside and had to stop to wait for the pedestrian crosswalk to clear, but the light was still green for cars. "I mean, their own parents didn't want them. That's _obviously_ their fault."

I associated being a foster kid with being abused most of the time. It's what had come out of it for me. I don't like to think about why I was in the system in the first place. Exactly what had I done to deserve it? I was a baby when my mom left me and she didn't even have the decency to let my father know I existed. She just abandoned me to a horrible system where I would have to live in pain and fear for the next sixteen years. Did I cry too much? Did I sleep too little? Was I too needy, too demanding of attention?

I sniffed but shut my eyes and refused to open them until I was sure that tears wouldn't end up sliding down my face. "The stigma set on them leads communities to expect them to be delinquents with drug problems, behavioral issues, and irresponsible, unethical attitudes." I took a bratty and imperious tone defensively and hoped that Booth would realize it wasn't to be a bitch, but rather because I was hurting. I wanted him to do absolutely nothing to approach me about hurting. "So much repression and bullying lends itself to becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy."

It was a good thing that Booth was trying to drive. If he hadn't been, he might have tried to look at me with the damn puppy dog eyes.

"Hey, Holly," the agent said, almost pained. "Some foster children… _are_ like the stereotypes, but… so are the kids that live with their parents." I rubbed the back of my neck with a hand and scratched my hairline with sharper edges of my fingernails. "You can't let them get to you."

 _You say that when you're the one people are poking fun at, starting rumors about, and taunting constantly._ He could sympathize, but he'd never be able to completely bridge that gap. Most of the time I was okay with that.

"As far as I'm concerned, you're not a foster kid anymore." I tuned back in and devoted my entire attention to listening. I had to shut my eyes again. _Not a foster kid._ If only he realized that wasn't a label he could just take away with a nice, sweet claim. It was easy to say that when I was only a little shy of eighteen anyway, when I wouldn't need an adult. "You're not going back to the system."

I covered my nose and sniffed again, looking down at my jeans and wishing that I was one of the people who could take something said with warmhearted and good intentions and actually believe it, rather than second-guessing myself and doubting everyone else's intentions. It was really a frustrating way to live sometimes. Okay – most of the time.

* * *

Kelly Morris' background was actually fairly nice on paper. A lot of kids, like myself, were in the foster system because their parents didn't want them. Another large fraction was deposited in the government's hands because they were in danger with their original caretakers. Lucky, Kelly and her brother – Alexander – had both gotten to enjoy a loving and stable home until four years prior, when both of their biological parents died in a freak fire incident. After less than three months, both children were taken in by a few different houses until finally settling in with Suzanne Evans, who let them keep their family's name.

It was hard for siblings to be relocated to the same place, especially when they were older, and even more so when there was a significant age gap between them. Alex had only been seven when Suzanne took them in, and a male seven-year-old had entirely different challenges than a pre-teen girl. Five years was also a notable stint in one place.

Brennan and I both scoured the papers more intently than Booth. Booth had a passion for protecting people, children in particular, but Brennan and I were more connected to the damage the foster system could cause. Between the three of us, if there were signs of abuse, the odds were high that one of us would catch them – Booth had protected his more vulnerable brother from a violent alcoholic at the expense of his own safety, Brennan had spent almost three years with physically abusive and emotionally negligent foster parents, and I had been beaten on and/or verbally abused for the majority of my life.

The only legitimate cause for concern was that Kelly had dropped out of high school. She had struggled academically, but hadn't been terrible, especially not at math or social studies. Some kids just did that, though, and I knew probably better than anyone that no matter how kind the foster home was, the experience in the system gave one a jaded perspective of themselves. I educated myself to survive and to spite others, but I just as easily could have done the same as Kelly. Everything else seemed straightforward – no unexplained injuries, no worries from teachers or other adults, no strange comments from any of her friends when she'd been in school.

Alex, on the other hand, was an excellent student. At this rate, he'd be on the honor roll when he moved out of junior high. He had a lot of friends, was very popular among his twelve-year-old peers, and the Morris' social worker noted affectionately that he wanted to play the drums in high school band. Between the two siblings, there had only been three emergency room trips since being orphaned. Alex had had the luck of sporting a broken leg and a mild concussion, due to a mishap in soccer practice and a dumb bike stunt respectively. Both reasons were consistent with the actual damage, and seemed like they could be attributed to youthful recklessness. Kelly's had been more alarming, but only because she'd discovered an allergy she didn't know she had.

Alex seemed well-loved and Kelly somewhat dismissed by their community. I wondered what the cause behind that was. Maybe it was because Alex was younger – but it didn't explain why I'd been treated like Kelly when I was his age. Very few people had expected me to succeed. I started to question why no one had seen any warning signs that I wasn't being cared for. All of these people noticed how happy Alex was. I hadn't been a fantastic liar when I was his age. That came with experience and practical application. Why hadn't anyone been able to tell that something was wrong and helped me? Maybe if my social worker had worked harder, I wouldn't have been nearly sixteen before finally finding a place to stay where talking back wouldn't end with me falling asleep hungry or hurting.

Not for the first time, I mused over what my life might have been like if my mother had told Booth she was pregnant. I kept wrestling over how it would have gone. Would I have even survived Booth's father? I didn't know how old he'd been when his grandfather intervened, and if it had been too late, then I might not have lived for very long under the guardianship of my grandfather. Contrastingly, I might've ended up in my great-grandfather's custody, along with my father and uncle, until Booth had turned eighteen. From what I heard of the oldest Booth, he was a patient and gentle caretaker – and although I was characteristically cynical, the agent's recounts didn't sound like the forced or evasive defenses of a victim.

 _It's pointless to grieve for what never happened._ My mother hadn't wanted me, for one reason or another, and hadn't respected Booth enough to give him a choice. I felt guilty to say that I was growing more and more resentful of her for it, until I remembered that Booth and I both had ample reason to be pissed off.

Suzanne was a bright-eyed woman in her mid-forties, and a single parent at that. I thought it was strange that someone had looked for her first foster kids at forty, but it possibly explained why she had been willing to go for older children. If she was a fit parent, it didn't really matter how old she was, but most individuals and social workers preferred volunteers in their late twenties and early thirties. They thought it was a good balance between the energy and health of a youth and the wisdom and maturity of an elder.

Curly brown hair drifted down to her shoulders, bouncy and loose over her navy green sweater. Her jeans were tucked into ankle-high brown boots. "Poor Dylan," she sighed, giving Booth back the photograph of our victim. "He was a good kid. He was a good influence on Kelly, trying to get her back into school."

For a second, I felt a flash of irritation. What did it matter to her boyfriend if she was in school or not? Why did anyone have to be an _influence_ on her? She wasn't an impressionable duckling. Then I grudgingly realized that I was _looking_ for a reason to be mad, and recognized that school was a good investment and that it was easy for a teenager, no matter their background, to get caught up in bad things if the people they spent time with encouraged them. If Parker were to get a girlfriend in ten years, I'd want her to be someone who'd urge him to make good decisions, not pressure him into smoking or trying out coke after school.

"And he was good to Alex," Suzanne added wistfully, frowning in concern while she twisted her head to look behind her. The door to Booth's office was ajar, but Alex was occupied with a book and sat on a chair near the wall outside in the bullpen. Alex probably didn't know it, but he was being surveilled by an agent multitasking at her desk. "Treated him just like a little brother…"

I smiled sadly. That was pretty good. Nothing would teach respect for women better than growing up with female role models, but I figured that it was important for boys to be able to see what roles men were expected to fill, just so they'd be socially aware of acceptable behavior and gender norms. If Alex chose not to comply with them, then good for him; but should he disagree, then he deserved to know why he might be viewed differently.

"To the best of your knowledge, were Kelly and Dylan sexually active?" Brennan asked, leaning on the side of Booth's desk, hands folded in front of her calmly. Booth sent her a bewildered and slightly scolding look, but she didn't see it.

"Oh, I know they were." Suzanne emphatically nodded. "I'm afraid I caught them in Kelly's bedroom and I had to forbid Kelly to bring Dylan into the house after that."

Booth's initial frown at Brennan deepened when he heard this. "Why?"

While I agreed that banning children from being together in response to sexual activity sent an undesirable message about their sexuality, he had to understand that it was necessary for the context. There were too many risks that the state didn't have the resources to support. For every pair that made the good decisions, there were going to be at least as many who made bad ones – and even the good choices could sometimes prove not to be enough. Contraceptives available to minors weren't foolproof.

"Rules of the system," I explained, the words falling before I remembered I'd been trying to stay unnoticeable and detached, slinking along the wall of the office, as per usual. Booth never commented on how I never really sat down when there were strangers in the room with us, and I was glad that he never pestered me about lingering habits. "They can't guarantee they'll use contraception, and condoms aren't foolproof. They can't risk a teenage pregnancy or STDs."

"Also, they're underage," Brennan added as a second thought.

I made a distasteful face, but made sure to let it go before the guy working for law enforcement noted my objections. There were too many problems with the underage law for me to fully support it. It did some to protect would-be victims of molestation and pornography, but it didn't account for two things: firstly, it could ruin opportunities for someone's entire life if they were penalized for being even a few months older than their significant other by putting them on a sex offender registry, and secondly, all it did for underage couples who chose to have sex was teach them that they would get in trouble if anyone knew about it. Fear of being punished would dissuade them from seeking resources they needed for safe practices, similar to abstinence-only education.

I hated abstinence-only education. I'd gone to a county like that and had gotten detention for correcting the teacher. A girl asked a certain anatomical question and was told that said body part was a myth. … It was not received well when I spoke up and said bluntly that the male teacher had very little experience with women, was ignorant about what he was trying to teach, or was intentionally giving false information to children about their bodies. Most of my sex ed had been self-taught at the library. I'd always been scientifically-minded, enjoying having answers, proof, and explanations.

Suzanne nodded and sighed, lifting up her hands helplessly. "I knew that it might force them to find other places to be together – you know, to feed into their own Romeo and Juliet fantasy. But Alex lives in the house too, and he's only twelve."

That was definitely another thing to consider. Alex wasn't old enough to understand the implications or consequences of sex, safe or not, and children tended to model their behaviors after their siblings' more often than not.

"Kelly and her brother. Were they close?" Booth asked, cocking his head.

I assumed that two kids in the foster system together would be closer than most siblings with the age and sex difference, and I was proven right by Suzanne, who confirmed it wholeheartedly. "Very close. Their parents were killed in a hotel fire four years ago. They had no family. They were put into the foster system. I've had them for a little over a year."

"That's a pretty good run for a foster kid," Brennan noted aloud knowingly. I wondered if she'd have chosen to stay with Russ, given the choice, before I remembered that Russ had, for a short time, been her guardian. Then he'd ditched, and so much for that. "Especially for a brother and a sister who want to be together."

Suzanne hesitated for a second. "Yes," she agreed demurely, lowering her head to look at her lap. She curled her fingers into her jeans at the knees.

We all noticed. Booth and Brennan shared a look when Brennan checked to see that he had seen. "What?" He asked gently.

The foster mother looked up and leaned back guilty. "Well… I'm not sure how much longer I can keep the both of them," she admitted quietly, looking again to double-check that Alex wasn't within hearing range. "I have diabetes, and I don't have the energy that I used to. And Kelly is a real handful. I've asked Child Services to look for alternatives."

I pursed my lips. Maybe it was for the best if she gave them to people better suited to care for them, but her secrecy suggested strongly that Alex was unaware of this, and I couldn't say I approved. If he was going to be uprooted from the place he'd been peacefully living right after this drama with his sister, he deserved to have fair warning.

"Did Kelly know?" Brennan asked. Her expression was bordering on cold, so I knew that she and I were thinking along the same lines where the younger kid was concerned.

"Yes." Suzanne swallowed. "I told her."

Trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, I assumed she told one and not the other because she thought Kelly was more equipped to handle it. Kelly going MIA soon after learning she might not stay in the most stable home she'd had since becoming a teenager seemed more than coincidental. The real question was how Dylan might have fit into it, but there were plenty of stories that could wrap neatly around the situation and include Dylan somehow, too.

The first thing, though, was establishing that Kelly would have been willing to leave for that reason. If she was upset about possibly losing her brother, she wouldn't have abandoned him, too. "How comfortable did she feel with you around Alex?" I asked suddenly.

Suzanne looked startled and for a second had no answer. I knew it wasn't something Kelly was likely to share, but the way she treated Suzanne should've let her make an intuitive conclusion. If she went out of her way to ensure that she was always with her brother, then there was a pretty clear meaning behind that.

"Unless she acted like she didn't want the two of you alone, she probably ran away so that her brother could stay with someone she trusted," I elaborated.

The door was pushed open. The brighter light from the main floor intruded and made me blink against it. All of us focused our attention on the short little figure that walked inside without invitation. Alex's book was closed, a finger stuck in between the pages. His hair was a bright, almost platinum, blond that complemented his rosy-red cheeks and bright green irises. The kid was about two feet shorter than me and had yet to get his growth spurts or lowering voice.

"Did they find Kelly or not?" He asked rudely, interrupting. The nervousness in his expression was what made me bite my tongue about how he entered.

"No, Alex." Suzanne pushed on the floor to turn the chair around and held out her arms for Alex. The boy obediently went to her and stood beside her chair, letting the brunette wrap an arm around his waist in a hug and look up at him. "But they found Dylan," she added, sounding uncertain of her decision to share. At the last moment, she gave Booth a pleading expression.

"Is he alright?" Alex inquired, perking up hopefully.

Booth rescued Suzanne, clearing his throat. "I'm – I'm afraid not," he answered for her regretfully.

Alex frowned and bit on the inside of his lip. It made his mouth look like he was pouting. His free hand balled up in his baggy grey hoodie – it looked like he was wearing Kelly's high school sweater. In another circumstance, it would've been cute. As it was, it was just sad that he missed her so much he was wearing her clothes. Maybe he could still smell her perfume on it.

"Dylan is dead," Suzanne informed Alex, cringing herself as she delivered it so directly. I was surprised, but applauded her for being forthright. Alex had only looked confused when Booth failed to specify what the problem was.

I moved slowly away from the wall and lowered myself onto my knees, then leaned back, digging my heels into the backs of my thighs. "Hey, Alex." I said friendlily, resting my elbows on my legs. "My name's Holly. I'm looking for your sister. Do you know where she is?" I questioned politely.

"No," he denied, shaking his head, a hand on Suzanne's arm.

"Are you sure?" I pressed, my tone even. I had no issues with babying a baby, but Alex was almost thirteen. I wouldn't treat a normal kid the same way I would've wanted to be treated at thirteen, but by his age, it wouldn't hurt to be firm and a little skeptical. Twelve-year-olds could lie. "Has she tried to contact you at all? Neither of you are in trouble, I promise." I hoped Kelly hadn't killed Dylan. It would suck if my promise was broken because we had to charge his sister with homicide.

"I don't know where she is," Alex insisted, looking down at me. He pushed his book into the pouch along the front of the sweater. It strained the fabric and almost didn't fit, and it made a comical boxy shape in front of his stomach. "She hasn't called me or anything. Do you think she's dead, too?"

I wasn't sure how I was going to answer that, but had opened my mouth anyway. I was pretty good at winging things. Before I was given the chance, Booth cut in, possibly worried that I would say something to Alex that too pessimistic for anyone ages twenty-five and below. "No," he replied, crossing his arms confidently. "I'm gonna find your sister and I'm gonna bring her back here to you."

I ground my teeth and stood up, losing some patience with Booth. He was in no such position to be making that promise. He couldn't know for sure that he could keep it, and statistically, it was looking more and more likely that it was an oath he would have to break. Telling the boy that we'd find Kelly if it turned out we couldn't was uncalled for and bordered on mean. False hope is one of the worst things you can give a person, isn't it?

"Really?" Alex dared to look optimistic and took his hand out of his pocket. He turned his head to Suzanne incredulously, and she smiled in support of Booth's proclamation.

"Absolutely," Booth vowed, giving Alex a conspiratorial wink. "This is the FBI, buddy." He reached for the name plaque at the front of his desk and turned it so that the part that read 'FBI Special Agent' was angled right at Kelly's brother.

* * *

At the lab, we walked in from the parking garage and began the short trek to Brennan's assigned office. She had managed to wait until we were here, turning things over in her head and trying to explain them to herself, until she broke and asked what I had been silently asking since he'd made promises he may not be able to keep.

"Were you lying to the boy?" She asked our partner curiously with a bit of concern. "Do you really think Kelly Morris is still alive?"

"Ah…" Booth seemed like he was about to dodge the question, but he saw Brennan giving him a stare that just dared him to try it. "I don't know," he admitted.

"You don't know if she's alive?"

"I don't know if I was lying," he corrected, pushing his arms back and shaking his jacket loose. He folded it in half and draped it over his arm, adjusting the collar of his shirt with his free hand. "You see, I just – I really just don't have a read on the sister yet. I mean, was she a bad guy? Was she a victim?" He asked. Brennan started to open her mouth to give some sort of answer, but Booth looked over his shoulder at me. "Hey, what do you think?"

Brennan, thinking that he was using me as a distraction, tugged on his sleeve. "Why are you asking her? She's been with us all day," she complained.

"Well, I don't wanna be insensitive," he chuckled, "But… seventeen-year-old girl in the foster system." He waved at me, motioning to come up between them and stop following like a shadow.

I did so reluctantly, but tried to derail the comparisons. "I never had a boyfriend to run away with and I never had a younger sibling to be concerned for." I already related to Kelly in a lot of ways, but I didn't want for Booth to start making too many comparisons of me to a possible murder suspect or victim.

He made a move like he was going to nudge me with his elbow, but remembered my stipulations on touch and aborted it at the last moment. "Just give it your best shot," he pressed with words instead.

 _I'm not getting out of this,_ I understood suddenly, and groaned just for good measure. "Alright," I wearily rubbed my hands together, anticipating when Brennan would try to turn left towards her office so that I didn't end up walking too closely to either of them. "My boyfriend wants to break up with me, but because his parents are telling him to. Assuming I'm not a control freak, I don't panic and kill him. Relationships come and go, and if I'm rational, I understand that, as minors, we don't have complete control of the situation."

I paused. It occurred to me that maybe I was giving Kelly an emotional maturity that she didn't have – we had the foster system in common, but not the abuse. I dismissed it. Booth had asked what I would do in her situation, not what I thought a different person might have done. Besides, the more different we were, the sooner he'd stop comparing me to someone else. "If he refuses to break up with me, his parents can punish him with repercussions that can hurt him worse than some emotional rejection can hurt me."

He clapped sarcastically. "Wow. You're not really romantic, are you?"

"Shut up," I grumbled. Romance was for girls who liked to touch and be touched. I considered it for a long moment while we kept walking. Kelly didn't have much to stay for, if not Dylan – she'd dropped out of school, would be eighteen in a matter of time anyway, and, although she was never in a bad relationship with Suzanne, wasn't a huge fan of her for banning her boyfriend from the house. There was only one other thing that might tie her to the city. "If I were going to go on the run, I'd do it for my brother," I decided, thinking of Alex but unwittingly envisioning Parker, with his floppy blond mess of hair and his bright, engaged eyes. "He's younger, he's in a more vulnerable position. He's the only family I have. If I run away, he stays with an adult whom I know and trust not to harm him.

"I'm older, and presumably know some kids in similar positions, and I'm almost an adult anyway, so I can probably make it long enough on my own… Or, say, I'm running away because I did something illegal. Probably defensively, but I know the majority of people will stack the deck against me. " _Because I'm in the system, because it's somehow my fault I can't keep a home._ "I don't think Kelly ran away to be a rebel. She had a lot to worry about for a kid." I demurely stated in a soft voice.

Somehow, I just knew that they were both looking at each other over the top of my head. It was unlike me to be dragged down by something like this, and it made me feel kind of sad that I identified so well with Kelly. She was someone I could've come very close to being, had things been just a little bit different for me.

Brennan grew uncomfortable with the uneasy quiet that came after my monologue – I was reasonably sure I'd only just reminded Booth of how close this case was to my own heart. She kindly tried to change the subject and move the concentration off of me. "Do you have a read on Dylan Crane?" She asked, turning it around to Booth again.

Booth was more than happy to take it back. "Oh, yeah," he confirmed, nodding quickly. "He had that whole adolescent savior complex thing going on, big time."

By Brennan's expression alone, it was clear that she did not have a nice perception of savior complexes of any sort, much less the adolescent kind. "Savior complex?" She repeated unhappily. We reached her office and filed in one after the other. I immediately went for the couch and sat down in the corner of the furniture.

"Yeah," Booth managed to sound like he was rationalizing it, even though his theory could not be scientifically backed up. He'd gotten better at sounding matter-of-fact since he'd started spending more time at the lab. I wasn't sure he always put those skills to good use. "Teenage boys love nothing more than the idea of saving the damsel in distress."

"How do you know?" Brennan enquired distrustfully as she went behind her desk and pulled out her chair.

Booth laughed, sharp and clear and astonished that she had even had to ask. "Well, because, you know – I was once a teenage boy!"

Brennan's disgruntled face made me giggle and hide my mouth behind my hand. She seemed as though it was a fact she didn't want to acknowledge, or questioned the legitimacy of. "You look strangely skeptical," I said to her with a grin, delighted by how unnerved she seemed at the prospect of a teenaged Booth.

"Hey," a softer voice called, looking in from the door. Saroyan rapped her knuckles on the frame as an afterthought, still leaning inside. She scanned the office before her eyes focused on Brennan. "DNA from the tissue under the victim's fingernail: female, and there's nail polish in the gouges on his arm."

I hadn't known there were gouges. It was beginning to piss me off, the little things that Saroyan didn't think were important enough to share with me. How could I do my job well if evidence was skipping past me? I was used to being the one that either discovered it or had it pointed out to me by Brennan or Hodgins, whichever scientist's forte it was covered by. Saroyan wasn't going to teach me the way that anyone else did, though, so she wouldn't flag me down or send me a message about a new find, and I'd have to hear it through someone else.

Brennan held up a hand to stop the pathologist before she got too far into that train of thought. "It wasn't necessarily from the murder," she discounted, and provided an alternative situation. "They were sexually active. She might've scratched him."

 _That must've been a hard scratch,_ I thought, a little bit amused, trying to work out how those gymnastics came into play. Seemed to me like it would be easier to scratch his back or chest than his forearms; the location alone was why we had assumed they were defensive. And, really, if they were that deep, were they really arousing anymore, or were they reason enough for bandages?

"Nope," Saroyan dismantled the theory right after it had begun to form. "Hodgins also found oxidized iron in the scratches." I wanted to be angry, but she had proof to back up her claim. I was still agitated just because she had been able to prove herself correct the first time around.

"Oxidized iron," Booth repeated, and he looked right back at me. "What's that?"

"Rust," I simplified.

Booth turned back on Brennan exasperatedly. "Why didn't you just say _rust?"_ He asked her, despite that she hadn't been the one to say 'oxidized iron' either. He didn't like when the talk got too scientific, because he had a harder time following along, and it made him feel not-so-smart.

The anthropologist looked betrayed. "She said it," she objected, pointing at Saroyan, who wasn't paying attention to the rapid tangent.

"The same oxidized iron found on the victim's upper back and shoulder," Saroyan additionally put in.

Brennan cocked her head to the side and cast her eyes down as she considered the evidence. Sometimes when she did that, she would move her hands or her arms as if mimicking the victim's positioning, just to see how the injuries would line up with other body parts. "Probably left behind by the weapon that struck him," she guessed tentatively. There were other explanations, but they seemed less likely, and where forensics is concerned, the trouble tends to be more in finding and less in interpreting; Occam's Razor usually applies to solid facts in the Medico-Legal lab.

"So, he was hit with what?" I looked back and forth between Booth, Brennan, and Saroyan, waiting for a reason to jump in and remind everyone that I existed and that I was on the payroll, too. "A rusty pipe?" Booth sounded insulted by the callousness of the weapon.

Saroyan raised her eyebrows, but conceded with a bob of her head that made her ponytail swish. "That's a reasonable assumption," she permitted.

Shocked and offended that another scientist would voluntarily let an assumption fly on casework, Brennan pushed her shoulders back and clicked her mouth shut suddenly. I crossed my arms. This was feeling too much like Carlie Richardson again, with Saroyan convinced that the killer had to be her husband. If she was making assumptions now, then who was to say she wouldn't be objective as she analyzed the rest of the evidence? She was the only pathologist, toxicologist, and serologist at our team's disposal; there wasn't another expert to review her data if she was biased.

"But an assumption nonetheless," I quickly reminded everyone, making eye contact with Booth meaningfully. He had made a vow to a twelve-year-old. He couldn't now risk breaking it because he got stuck fixated on one possible situation.

The agent didn't quite get the cue. "Okay, so Dylan tells the girlfriend they're breaking up," he hypothesized.

Saroyan picked up her hands and swung amateurishly at the air, pretending to be wielding a bat or a pipe. "She whacks him across the carotid with a pipe-"

"And pushes him out the window," Booth concluded, making a dipping motion with his hand and throwing in a cartoony, whistling sound effect for good measure.

Saroyan nodded, smirking slightly as Booth's special effects lifted her spirits from the dreary discussion of teenagers' deaths. "Exactly."

It wasn't exactly the hypothesizing that pissed me off. It was that Booth ignored a cue I tried to send, it was that Saroyan had left me out of the chain, and it was that I couldn't stop emotionally overreacting at Saroyan, which, in turn, made me angrier with _myself._ I hated being irritable and snippy all the time, but she made it so hard to be anything else. It was that Saroyan didn't seem to think very highly of foster kids, thought that it wouldn't be a surprise if I was murdered and dumped in with garbage, maybe even thought that the odds were likely a foster kid did something to deserve being killed.

Although Brennan would never admit it – possibly not even to herself – I believed she felt the same angers and insecurities waking themselves up after being put to sleep a long time ago, and that was why the theories and guesses were making her so uptight. Whether or not she recognized it, there were parallels here that were bound to put both of us in a hard emotional and social situation. It wasn't unusual for Saroyan to contemplate possible scenarios. It was even more stressful to hear how little she thought of the kind of children we'd been.

The worst part of it all was that, even when Saroyan finally realized that she had two very angry women glaring at her from different directions, she didn't realize what we found so infuriating. _How could she? She doesn't know._ Yet I didn't want to listen to reason; I wanted to be mean and make her leave me and my family in peace.

Saroyan shuffled so her back was towards Booth and it would be faster for her to leave the office. "Is it just me, or are we suddenly the gazelles stupid enough to drink in the open?" She asked him with some lazy concern, not truly bothered by either reaction she was getting.

"What?" Booth looked hurt by our hostility. "What's with the stink eyes? It's just a theory."

My mentor visibly bit her tongue to keep from saying something that likely didn't really need to be said. "There was cheap nail polish in the box of Kelly's belongings," she stated firmly, her tone cool and measured. "You should see if there's a match." It was taking effort from her to pretend like things were normal, and she wasn't managing to pull it off.

Saroyan reached for Booth with one hand when she turned back to confirm Brennan's request. Her hand brushed the side of his arm, bringing to mind Angela's conviction that they'd used to have a thing, and I shuddered all over again.

"Find some hair," she told him. "Match the DNA on that, and then we get started on the – uh – the murder weapon."

"Yeah," Booth agreed noncommittally, taking the displeasure he was getting from Brennan and I much more seriously than he was taking the raven-haired woman's halfhearted, mostly one-sided talk.

With no warning or indication as to what was wrong, Brennan picked up the jacket she had only just discarded, pushed in her chair, and departed, heading for the door with a spiteful lift in her walk. Determination made her stride strong and confident, and it bounced the loose strands of hair that had fallen out of her hair tie. Saroyan watched her employee began to glide past and blinked, surprised by the new action.

I cleared my throat and rose from the couch. I was not going to be left alone to suffer. "I'm going to go find Zach," I stated icily to Booth, and didn't deem Saroyan worth saying anything in particular to.

"What?" Booth called, truly clueless. "What did we say?"

I turned around to look at them both. I was closer to the brunette at this point, and I kept a more than satisfactory breadth of space between the range of my hands and her actual position. "Well, since you two seem so _sure_ that Kelly – oh, I'm sorry, _the foster kid_ – killed her boyfriend and shoved him to his death, I'm going to play the side of the devil's advocate and actually look for evidence exonerating this frightened teenager who ran away from reasons we're only guessing at." I knew that my emphasis wouldn't phase Saroyan, but I hoped it at least left an impression on Booth. There were other people involved, too – the parents, Suzanne, Alex, and people we hadn't even met yet, but before we had all the information, they were already developing inconclusive stories about how Kelly was the bad person responsible for another's death.

"Point of fact: the pipe, _if_ that's even what it was, was _not_ the murder weapon." Brennan heatedly joined my side to argue for the benefit of the doubt, both for Kelly's sake, for ours, and for the justice that all children deserved, regardless of whether they were in the foster system or not. "The evidence, if anybody cares, shows that Dylan Crane died from a _fall_."

 _Stop hoping and pulling for the case to fit a suspect you don't like just because of your views of the foster system. We're just as capable as anyone else!_ I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs and create a scene. Instead, I turned my chin up and followed Brennan in solidarity.

* * *

Saroyan had finished with stripping the bones clean by the time we'd finished talking to Suzanne, so we had a full skeleton to work with as a way to vent our irritation. Zach had been planning on doing most of the first run on his own, so our abrupt and irate stalk up onto the platform made him actually put his hands out and back away like he was in trouble.

"No compression fractures to the ulna or phalanges." Zach held up his arms and considered, his forearms near his head. "So his arms weren't outstretched or across his face."

"Which means he wasn't bracing for impact," Brennan concluded rationally. It was pure instinct to defend yourself from a blow, and it was also an uncontrolled impulse that drove people to try to stop their fall with their arms.

"He didn't see it coming." Since the blunt force trauma wasn't angled to have come from right in front of him, it was possible he had thought he was safe. More likely, though, he had been turned away, or incapacitated. "Maybe he was unconscious," I suggested, because even if he hadn't been facing the assailant, he probably would've noticed a several-story drop.

Zach looked up and pensively added, "Perhaps from being struck by the rusty pipe."

Brennan and I both looked up from the bones. Zach's face said he wished he could take his words back, even though he had no idea why we were objecting. Brennan sent him a short, stern glare. "Don't you start," she groaned.

"Start what?" He replied, puzzled and innocent.

"We don't know _what_ he was struck with yet."

Zach frowned, his eyebrows pulling together and his shoulders lifting. "I analyzed the impact damage, and the weapon was a cylinder approximately two inches in diameter. That, plus the oxidation residue, suggests – in the vernacular – a rusty pipe." Still, his hands remained in front of his chest, just in case Brennan felt the need to swing a rusty pipe at him.

She relaxed. Zach, tentatively put his hands down on the edge of the table near the remains of the victim's left hand. "Good," she said in a short praise, possibly a little guilty for (ironically) jumping to the conclusion that Zach was jumping to conclusions. "If you tell me _that,_ I get it. It's empirical, not guesswork." Frustration still resonated in her tone.

"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet!" Hodgins recited, walking up to the platform from the direction of his lab. I scowled and breathed in, then stuck my tongue out and turned my head in the opposite direction. The entomologist brought with him a scent even worse than decomposition – public dumpsters.

Instead of making a jab at him about Shakespeare, I was busy being repelled by the pungency of his new "cologne." Zach, when given the opportunity, spat out the play and the exact location of the phrase with concerning accuracy. " _Romeo and Juliet,_ act two, scene two; the quote considered to most aptly describe the central conflict of the play." Zach seemed proud to know this, but then faltered and looked down, bothered by something else. "Which I totally do not understand."

I rolled my eyes. Struggling through the book had been a chore for me because of the old language, but for Zach, I imagined the worst parts would be the metaphors and the purple prose that the iconic Brit wrapped every story with.

Still, if he knew the basic plot points, he would be able to understand practically every pop reference, so I entertained myself by doing him the favor and explaining it all in as simple and straightforward a way as I could.

"Romeo think Juliet pretty," I cooed, miming holding my hands to my heart like a love-struck idiot. "Juliet not like fiancé." I made the dismissive gesture with my hands. "Romeo family hate Juliet family. Tybalt kill Mercutio." I raised my right hand like I was holding a sword. "Impugned honor!" I raised my voice and pretended to be furious, then made a stabbing motion. "Romeo kill Tybalt. Disgrace!" I gasped and held my left hand over my face without actually touching the evidence gloves to my skin. "Flee fair Verona!"

Hodgins burst into laughter, roaring with giggles and holding his hands to his side over a stitch. The corner of my mouth twitched, threatening to betray my portrayal by smirking. Zach looked alarmed and cutely bemused by my regression into kindergarten grammar, but, sweetly enough, paid intense attention to everything I said and did. Brennan rolled her eyes, but did so with a level of affection, and leaned on the computer desk nearest to her.

They just spurred me on to play some more. "Avoid unwanted wedding, trickery – fake poison! Romeo sad, get real poison!" I pretended to slit my throat. "Romeo kill Paris!" Another aggressive, melodramatic lunge and wave of an imaginary sword later, I tipped my hand and head back like I was drinking something. "Romeo drink poison. Juliet panic, kiss Romeo," I paused and decided to leave that to the imagination. "Stab self." I mimicked impaling a dagger into my chest. "Dead kids force parents think hard." I tapped the side of my head while mocking the families. "Families decide rivalry stupid."

Hodgins, inconsolable and in stitches, giggled loudly. I bowed to him over the edge of the platform and saluted Zach. "There, you've got the basic run-down."

Zach mulled the performance over thoughtfully. "It's hard for me to understand the prose and the sentiments," he assessed slowly, proving my assumptions correct, "But I promise I can grasp the meaning of complex sentences if you were to explain in a straightforward way."

Brennan smiled and Hodgins hooted. I narrowed my eyes. "I'm not explaining it again," I flatly stated. "I hated that story."

" _Yeah…"_ Hodgins, still with a huge grin on his face, lowered his hands. "Moving past Xena's incredible poetic talent," he teased. I curtsied, "The flower in Dylan's hand was a rosea calyx – a rosebud."

Brennan raised her eyebrows, more amused by Hodgins' analysis than by my one-woman play. I felt a little slighted. At least I had acted it out.

"You do not smell like a rose," she pointed out.

"More like a skunk," I ribbed.

Hodgins gave me a _well, duh_ look that I should've seen coming, but I still forgot sometimes that he was weird enough to _want_ to go dumpster-diving. "I've been sifting through _two tons_ of garbage," he said to me knowledgably, as if this made me somehow more impressed. In reality, it just made me more disgusted. "Which you should ask me about." He put his hands on his hips and beamed.

Brennan knew it was something about the case. "Ask what, exactly?"

"How about I ask you when you're gonna shower?" I taunted again, only a little bit kidding.

Hodgins gave me a dirty look, to which I smirked proudly. The hilarity just never ended with me.

"Poultry skin loaded with garlic and chives," he began to explicate on his own, still sending me the fishy sideways look through narrowed eyes. "Red beets, empty imported vodka bottles, and traces of osetra fish eggs." _Ew. Caviar._ "Put 'em together and where are we?"

He held his hands out excitedly, expecting us to clamor over ourselves to blurt out the answers like we were in an elementary school classroom. Zach and I looked at each other, shook our heads, and then looked back at Hodgins, who was growing more and more deflated with each second that passed in expectant silence.

"… Anyone?" He tried again, throwing his arms a second time in hopes that renewing the vigor would also produce some interest.

Brennan looked clueless. I decided to take a go at it, just because it was sad to watch him be the only one so excited about a bunch of trash. "Sounds like eastern Europe," I sighed as I played along. We usually took turns indulging him, so I guess it was going to have to be mine sooner or later. "Vodka makes me guess Russia?"

Enthusiasm proved founded, he pointed up at me and snapped. "Bingo, baby!"

There was a long, incredibly awkward pause. Brennan bit at her lip and I looked up and studied the catwalks.

"I…" Hodgins faltered and dropped his arms, making himself look small and anxious. "I didn't mean to call you that, it just kinda… slipped out…" His face was shadowed with regret. "Please don't tell Booth…"

* * *

 **A/N: Love it? Hate it? Let me know!**


	14. The Boy in the Shroud, Part Three

This wasn't the part of FBI work that I liked. We'd just canvassed the area near the park Kelly and Dylan had liked to go to. It was towards the part of the city I used to live in, so I recognized a lot of the landmarks and territory, but it also made me uncomfortable to be near where I used to live with my partners.

Luckily for me, after more than an hour, Booth was ready to give up. "Whoa…" He sighed, pinching his nose and looking up at the printed photographs of both teenagers. "Okay, so that was a horrible idea. But on the upside, one restaurant and no Starbucks." His upside was presented sarcastically.

"Yeah, there's a reason real estate here is cheap," I agreed in a mutter, crossing my arms.

Brennan looked down the side of the alley before we crossed the street onto the next block towards Booth's SUV. She stopped walking. "You know, no one we've talked to had recognized either Kelly or Dylan, but they're all homeowners, civil servants, and entrepreneurs. We've been asking people who they wouldn't have been talking to. We could ask them."

Booth and I shared a look. Her logic actually made a lot of sense. I remembered very specifically avoiding anyone who looked like they had a position of authority. If Booth hadn't come into the bar asking specifically for me, I probably would've disappeared and let someone else handle him once I'd identified him as a fed. When you don't have income or adults to provide things for you, you do what you have to to survive. Sometimes those things aren't legal… like forging signatures to get housing, or serving alcohol while underage.

There was a group of minors down the street in the alley, parked in a gaggle around a stationary white van. From their clothes and their body language, I could tell right away that they were part of Kelly's demographic: spending their time on the street, in back alleys, closed-off and dressed in secondhand garb that didn't entirely fit. Kelly was lucky that Suzanne had the ability and the willingness to provide for her and Alex as well as she did.

Booth put both of the photos in his pocket. "Why?" He asked her, looking as though the idea of approaching the kids made him uncomfortable. I shifted and subtly moved a little further away from him. When he acted like he felt uncomfortable with people like them, it reminded me that he might've acted that way about me if he hadn't been arresting me when we'd met.

"Because they share the same unique sociocultural identifiers as Kelly Morris," Brennan explained, sending Booth a disapproving frown as though he should've known that already.

"She means that they're in the same age group," I translated.

"Yeah." Brennan nodded and crossed her arms, turning her eyes to Booth. "That's exactly what I said."

For a moment, it looked like the agent was seriously considering it. He sucked in on the side of his cheek and looked down the alley, sizing up the people that he saw. A couple of boys broke apart from the crowd, pushing past the group and slinking down the sidewalk. One was lanky and taller than Booth, brown-skinned and thin enough for me to see his bones more prominently than I should've. The other was quiet, reserved, shorter, European, and wore a black sweater zipped up to his chin, despite the temperature. I tried not to think very hard about why someone might do that – about why I still did that.

"No." Booth shot it down decisively, shaking his head. I rolled my eyes. Now we were going to have to argue before we did what Brennan had just suggested. My priorities lied first with finding Kelly, and people she might've actually talked with were the strongest lead. "They will melt away before we get half a sentence out."

"Right." Brennan cynically agreed. She pulled on her right sleeve and started taking her jacket off. "You just watch."

I hesitated to shoot her down. I hated disagreeing with her. The problem was that she couldn't use her normal, blunt approach. If someone had come to me asking about someone I knew (or didn't, for that matter) I'd have evaded and then been gone as quickly as possible. Hell, if some stranger started asking questions like that _today_ , I'd probably do the same thing.

"Sorry, Dr. Brennan, but if you ask questions about their own, with nothing to use against them, they won't stick around." I warned. For all that we had in common, Brennan had never had to survive on her own. Her foster parents had been bastards, but she had almost always had access to food, water, and shelter. I didn't want to say she was lucky, but we hadn't faced the same struggles. "When you're on the streets, you look after yourself, and you only listen to adults when you can use them to your advantage." I took a step back and canted my head. "What, exactly, do you plan on offering them?"

Brennan was loaded enough to just hand out money, and while I didn't doubt that nine out of ten of the adolescents on the street would take it without question, there was nothing there to ensure an honest answer, or even further cooperation after an exchange was made. Besides, that just didn't seem classy.

She frowned at me, her coat draped over her left arm and held close to her body. "But I'm not a cop," she objected, not seeing why it had to be more complicated. "I won't arrest them or get them in trouble."

I bit my tongue on saying that she couldn't prove that. Cops weren't the only ones that could make trouble for people who had to take to alleyways in the slums to be safe.

"Look, like Holly says-"

"Okay," I interrupted Booth, who had started to offer his opinion and back me up. He cut himself off and stared at me like I'd done something insane, and Brennan seemed even more puzzled that I'd changed my mind without warning. There were some things that couldn't be explained, and this was one of them. If she wanted to understand the subculture, she'd have to watch it happen. "Go ahead. Try. But if I'm right, we go with my approach next time."

I tried not to sound like I was certain she would fail, but there was a degree of inevitability. It was very unlikely that her idea would work out, but I didn't want to seem arrogant. I still wasn't used to having different opinions and approaches than the people around me and actually caring about those differences.

She nodded determinedly and turned around to go approach the boys walking up the alley towards us. They were sticking near the wall of the brick building to the left. I watched her leave. Her gait was confident and purposeful.

"She didn't even look at me," Booth complained. I didn't acknowledge him. I didn't want to get into the discussion about how Brennan and I had understandings he could never get in on – _ever._ Our experiences were all based on the foundation of terrible parents, but the outcomes had all been incredibly different. "What do I know? I've only been working the streets my whole career." He pushed his hands into his pockets and leaned on the wall just inside the alley to supervise. "Hey, how do you know that?" He turned his head to me curiously.

I felt a bitter taste rising in my mouth. "I don't want to talk about it."

Booth's eyes lingered for a second, but he focused his attentions in on Brennan again, which left me standing there feeling like a jerk. Amy wanted me to communicate with him more. I wanted to, but I didn't want to have meaningful communication. It was hard to open up. At my insistence, we _never_ talked about my childhood. There was a reason he never got on me about dressing for the weather. Most of the injuries his father had inflicted on him had healed without permanent marks, and of the ones that hadn't, he was proud to know he'd gotten them protecting his brother.

I swallowed and looked towards the ground. It was hard to be part of a family. Booth was trying so hard, and I was doing my best for Parker, but sometimes I forgot that Parker wasn't the only one who needed to be considered. I liked that he gave me space, but when I saw him every day for work, it was hard to really step back and get perspective.

 _There are probably worse topics than this that I'd enjoy even less._ I reasoned, shifting and stretching my neck.

"When it started getting really bad… or when I got sick… I'd go to places like this." I gestured towards the group by the van down the road. My voice came out quiet and soft. I felt a burning sensation in my face that crept up to my ears as shame and embarrassment got to me. I always hated admitting to being from this background, especially to people like Booth, who had so much to their credit. "Other kids, sometimes younger, sometimes older, shared money and first aid. I spent time out here so I could help when people were injured."

I kept my eyes fixed on the ground and kept my mouth shut. I didn't want to say any more; say that when I got _too_ sick, I wouldn't even dare coming out here for help, because I couldn't trust that I'd be able to fight off anyone that tried to assault me on the off chance that someone did.

Still, I knew that he had paid attention. He could be a great listener sometimes. "Thought you said you didn't want to talk about it," he stated mildly, his voice as quiet as mine had been.

"I don't," I established quickly, looking up and staring intently as the boys Brennan had approached stopped and put their backs to the wall. "Doesn't mean you don't want to know."

"I'm an anthropologist," Brennan introduced. "I'm not a cop."

I dropped my head into my hand and rubbed my forehead.

The teens both looked up towards Booth and I. Booth cheerfully held out a hand and waved. The tall one snorted and looked back to Brennan. " _That_ is most definitely a cop."

"Thank you," Booth called. "See? They're _very_ cooperative, aren't-" I knew he was trying to prove a point, but he was antagonizing the situation. Glowering, I took a deep breath and kicked out, slamming my toes into his heel. "Ah! Really?!"

"Shut up and stop being rude," I grumbled, crossing my arms again.

The one in the sweater rolled his eyes and said something under his breath. He gave his friend a shove in the back and they both started to leave. Brennan chased after them, pulling up the hem of her shirt to find the photographs in her pocket.

"Wait, wait," she objected, holding them up and turning them over. "Will you just take a look at these pictures and tell me if you recognize them?"

Both of the boys stopped. The mouthy one glanced at the pictures and shifted. The short one, who looked like one of those kids that was a quiet ball of rage and temperament, kept sending suspicious looks towards Booth, and me, by association.

"Give me five bucks and I'll tell you," the first one propositioned, looking up and crossing his arms stonily. He had a cocky lift to his mouth that I didn't like.

I started shaking my head not to do it, but Brennan didn't even look up towards us to see. Instead, she changed both photos to her left hand and dropped the other to her pocket again. _Is she-? She is._ She took out her billfold and opened it, taking out a folded bill. Booth scoffed, but shook his head with a mix of fondness and amusement. I regretted not warning her ahead of time not to let them bribe her, but she treated it like it was a legit transaction, passing the money over and pushing her wallet away. I made a mental note to keep an eye on the boys' hands in case they tried to lift it.

"Here you go." She prompted. "So, who is it?"

The kid waited until he'd pocketed the money, still smirking, before he snorted and jerked his hand towards his friend. "It's his sister," he answered. Booth raised a hand to cover his mouth so that Brennan didn't see his smug satisfaction. The brat took the photo and turned it sideways. "But hold it this way, right, because the only time anyone ever _sees_ his sister is on her back."

Disregarding how offensive the statement was, I sighed. Brennan stared at him skeptically. "Yeah…" She reached out to take the picture back from him. "I'm assuming this isn't your sister?" She checked with the other taciturn kid.

"No, it is!" The first promised boisterously.

"Okay. I'd like my money back, please."

I didn't know which was more naïve: that she'd given them the money to begin with, or that she expected them to refund her. The kid looked at her like she was crazy, snorted disrespectfully, and scraped his shoulder on the wall behind him as he turned to get away from her. His friend kept his eyes off of the woman while they left, and though Brennan lowered the photos with frustration, she didn't pursue them.

She came back to us, disgruntled and agitated. I knew she wouldn't want to admit that she'd been wrong, but there were very few ways that she could spin that. Still trying to be sympathetic, I hooked my thumbs through the belt loops on my jeans.

"Well, there they go," Booth chirped, waving at their backs again. He was doing it as a show for Brennan's benefit. "Bye. Yep. That really worked now, didn't it?" He kept smiling his infuriating _I-was-right-and-you-were-wrong_ smile. Usually he reserved it for instances in the bureau when Brennan's plans were derailed by things like legal codes and civilian rights. "Great."

Brennan shot him an unappreciative glower with smoldering eyes. Mutinously, she stood beside me and pretended not to hear him. "They just took my money for nothing," she complained to me, resentfully glaring down the alley.

"That's because they're _exploited,"_ Booth gloated shamelessly. _"Misunderstood…"_

"I didn't see any track marks," I offered, attempting to be helpful without also being overly optimistic. "So the odds are lower that they're supplementing addictions."

The sound of a van door sliding open made us all look down the alley. The van that had been still had opened up its back door partway. It was a sliding door on the side of the SUV facing the sidewalk. A few of the teens on the street came closer to it. A dark-skinned hand reached out from inside, passing something out to the girl standing right outside with natural highlights in her brown hair.

Booth groaned, on alert. "You've gotta be kidding me! I mean, _jeez,_ they could at least wait until my back is turned, right?" As he talked, he reached for the pistol on his hip.

Seeing whoever was inside hand things out placed the van somewhere in my memory. It explained why I hadn't been unnerved by the standard kidnappers' vehicle sitting motionless on a street with a bunch of adolescents.

"No, Booth, wait!" I tried to jump and grab at his sleeve, but Booth was already moving forward, and he didn't wait for me to finish speaking before he was yelling down the street.

"FBI, hands in the air!"

I aborted my motion to pull him back; there was no point now. The girl with the brown highlights turned to see us, shrieked _"cops!"_ and bolted, keeping whatever she'd been given.

"Katie!" A man's voice called out defeatedly.

The others all responded instinctively to the warning and began to scramble, most of them taking off in dead runs in the opposite direction. A few moved to the other side of the street and made hasty work out of fleeing the scene. I hadn't expected any less. When I was trying to get my hands on things that twelve-year-olds shouldn't have to procure for themselves in New York, I'd trained myself to go out of my way to avoid police and other civil servants. I may be right there beside Hodgins when he taunts Saroyan about Broadway and street performers, but I knew as well as she did that there were darker, more solemn sides to where she'd come from.

From the door, a man stepped out – white and tall, scruffy, not clean shaven – and was followed by a black woman with loose, corkscrew hair and a blue crew top. They were both at least thirty, and the woman was still holding a sealed, see-through plastic bag.

The man put his hands behind his head. "There's no problem here! No problem!"

Booth aimed his gun at the woman who held the stuff and made a nod with his head towards Brennan. "I'll cover you. Go see what they're dealing, Bones." She sent him an offended look to tell him that she certainly would not be going to see what they were dealing.

"They're not dealing!" I raised my voice a little more than I probably should have, but I was pissed off with the situation. I reached for his hands and pushed down on his wrists, forcing him to lower his weapon. "Damn it." I sighed and raised a hand to Fran in greeting. "Hey."

She recognized me, despite how different I knew I must've looked from how I used to be, and smiled slightly. "Holly."

Booth did a double-take, putting his gun back in its holster. "What, you know them?"

"I said," I announced again, gritting my teeth. _Now Brennan's going to know, too._ Every time I shared a piece of myself, it was like it kept getting repeated and passed around until it was common knowledge. I should've known better than to feed the cycle. "I used to spend some time here helping the kids that needed help."

To show that they were absolutely not a threat, I forsook any sort of safety precaution and started strolling down the street. Kevin lowered his hands from behind his head. Fran had already dropped hers to her thighs and looked over her shoulder where most of the street kids had already disappeared, turning one way or the other after exiting the alley.

"Can I see one of those bags, please?" I asked, grimacing. I felt like I was betraying people who'd once helped me by working for the FBI, but I just wanted to prove they weren't dangerous.

"Yeah." Fran held out the one she still had. "Here it is."

I turned around to show my partners while moving to the side, standing so my back wasn't to either of the two, and opened up the bag. "Look," I called. Brennan came forward, her head canted curiously and convinced there wasn't a reason to be wary. Booth seemed intent on being crabby that things hadn't gone the way he'd planned, but reluctantly started to come closer. I took out bottles I could've gotten from Walmart and held them so the labels faced my partners. "Multivitamins, OTC Ibuprofen, Advil, children's Tylenol." I pulled out a small blue box. "DayQuil…" I put that back and turned over the bag to see other things stuffed inside. "Bandages, gauze, alcoholic wipes." I gave the bag over to my roommate when she came close enough and turned to Fran, gesturing towards her van. "Can I-?"

She nodded and stepped back in symbolic invitation. I went up to the curb and looked inside. There were entire crates of bags packed similarly, as well as other supplies to make more. Past the purple crates of OTC medical supplies, there were plastic orange boxes of unopened food, green crates of hygienic supplies, and entire cases of bottled water, still wrapped in the plastic. "There's also prepackaged meals, unopened water bottles, toiletries…" I called over my shoulder. I also noticed the boxes of condoms, but I deliberately left them out. Booth and I had different ideas about how sex should be marketed, and I doubted he'd agree with the idea of handing out free contraceptives to minors on the street.

I moved back. "I tried telling you," I reminded him tensely, holding my hands up uselessly. There was nothing he could use against his so-called drug dealers.

* * *

Kevin gestured to his wife, who stood in front of the van after sliding shut the door. "Franny and I have been doing this for years."

Brennan glanced at me. I couldn't confirm or deny, since I hadn't been in DC for _that_ long, but I kind of shrugged. This wasn't a new development. Fran had most of her attention on Booth. She was annoyed, but she wanted to get the agent off of her back so that she could get back to fixing what he'd broken.

"Sandwiches, clothing, vitamins. Some basic hygiene supplies for homeless kids."

Brennan looked up at Booth with an amused, childishly delighted grin. "You must be really embarrassed," she whispered. Booth glared.

"Maybe next time he'll listen to me when I tell him to question first, shoot second." I picked up my head and reflected Booth's glower right back at him. I'm usually the first one to suggest pulling out firearms, so one can generally assume that if I say to put down the gun, I have a reason worth listening to.

"Hey, you know what?" Booth defensively argued. "It was _suspicious behavior._ Alright? And besides, they're –" He gestured at them vaguely. "It's not like they're… are you social workers?" He demanded, realizing he didn't actually know if his argument was correct.

Fran shook her head. Kevin stated bluntly, "Nope."

Booth turned on us again. "They aren't social workers," he reiterated.

"Neither am I, but no one said I couldn't stay with Donovan while we were waiting for his dad to get out of federal custody," I pointed out abrasively. It wasn't right to say that only social workers could help people in need. There were millions of people who did kind things for others that needed it, and if they were told they had to stop if they weren't a social worker, then the ramifications on the community they impacted would be extreme.

"Well, I _apologized,_ okay?"

I bit my tongue. _It's_ _ **not**_ _okay._ It was a misunderstanding, sure, but not all misunderstandings are so small that they can be swept under the rug and ignored. I wondered if any of the kids who were now too scared to come back would suffer through dangerously-high fevers or starve because they couldn't afford food. What if they started selling themselves for money, raising their risks of pregnancy or disease? Not to mention the psychological ramifications.

"Do you know how long it takes to gain some trust around here?" Fran breathed deeply, but shot her arm out and pointed down the alley. "Make a scene like this, and these kids aren't going to talk to us for weeks."

"I'm sorry," I apologized again helplessly. "I tried to stop him."

I remembered all too clearly needing help and being dissuaded by the fear of getting caught. It could've been that I needed food and was afraid of being caught in the kitchen after bedtime, or that I needed a doctor for an infection but was too terrified of what would happen if going to the clinic raised red flags and got the police called. Foster parents had terrified me into sacrificing my health for the sake of my survival. No one should have to give up the things like clean water just so they know they can survive.

The idea that Booth had – however unintentionally – pushed more people into that situation sobered me. We had an impact on the world. We touched people's lives. Usually we did it for the better, but sometimes it didn't go that well, and whenever someone was hurt, it made me wonder if I was the kind of person suited for a job where I had any sort of authority.

Fran sighed, shaking her head. There was no point in fussing too much now – the damage was done. It wouldn't be fixed by being angry. She had always been cool-tempered, anyway.

"It's okay. I understand."

"Oh, good. Maybe you can do us a favor in return." I scoffed when I looked up at Booth, seriously questioning his logic. _In return?_ We hadn't done them a favor. If anything, we'd done them a disservice. "Show them the picture," he instructed Brennan.

She looked mutinous, but didn't argue with Booth when she took it out again. She seemed a little warier of what kind of answer she might get this time. At least she'd learned something from this expedition.

"We're looking for someone. A girl." Fran held her hand out and Brennan set the photo down in her palm. Fran shifted it up between her fingers and sighed, holding it so her husband could see. He lifted his head and looked down the street, clenching his jaw. "Do you recognize her?"

"Dylan and Kelly." Fran handed the photo back. "We haven't seen them around here in a couple of weeks."

It surprised me that she knew about Dylan, too – he wasn't in the photograph. If they knew about her boyfriend, they probably knew her relatively well.

There was really no way to soften the blow here without treating them like kids, so I just went for it. "We found Dylan's remains in the contents of a garbage truck that services this neighborhood. We haven't found Kelly yet."

Kevin looked like he was going to be sick. Fran swallowed with an expression of disgust and unease. "Oh, God," he gagged. "What happened?"

Booth seemed surprised by Kevin's strong reaction, especially when compared to Fran's much more composed grief. "Well, that's what we're trying to figure out."

The two spouses looked at each other for a moment, communicating silently. Brennan pocketed her photograph, looking satisfied that something good had come out of carrying it. After a moment, Fran's shoulders fell and she looked back to us seriously. Kevin seemed to have a realization at the same time.

"Warehouse," Fran said, supposedly in answer.

"Yup," Kevin agreed, turning and waving with a hand for us to follow. "Come with us."

* * *

Following people around streets with low foot traffic wasn't really in accordance with my code on safe living, even when those people were the ones who had given me medicine and meals before. I recognized the streets – they weren't completely strange – but just having Brennan and Booth in front of me, both of whom were so obviously from another area, made it feel foreign to be back again.

Part of the neighborhood used to be designated for more industrial purposes, and many had been used. Most of them had been emptied out and left to rot inside and out as contracts expired, better locations opened, and this neighborhood grew a larger crime rate and worse reputation. There were two or three blocks where old workshops and their storage houses were left to people who didn't have anywhere better to go. The city liked to pretend they were abandoned twenty-four seven.

"What _is_ this place?" Brennan pulled her sleeves down to her palms and seemed particularly unimpressed with how poorly maintained the facilities were. Moss, fungus, and mold grew on old, warped wood and on wet bricks with cracks in the mortar, giving off a smell. Darker corners and the cracks between the bricks and the sidewalk were home to old cobwebs and insect nests.

No matter how much I wanted to leave, Hodgins would've loved the place.

Kevin didn't look over his shoulder. "A squat."

Fran, however, did. "Every one of these old factories houses junkies and squatters." She pointed up at the one that we were walking past. "This is one of the favored ones because it's not as wet or cold."

Several yards down, there was even a nice, small staircase that could've looked fancy and nice, thirty or forty years ago. The only nice thing about it now was a dash of color on the first step from what looked like white orchids. I hated thinking that _this_ ugly place was a favored hub for any community.

"Almost every city has them, if you know where to look." I stated softly, hanging back and walking last in the short parade. I remembered the larger cities, where everything was wilder, and the smaller ones, where the competition felt more feral. It was like in the big cities, everyone realized they were equally screwed and stopped trying to rip each other's throats out simply for existing. Now, if there was money involved, that was a different story.

"Yeah, and kids with nowhere else to go." Kevin sounded both sad and contemptuous. I chose to hope it was because it was repulsive that a civilized people such as ourselves could boast all these accomplishments and policies, but couldn't seem to wake up and realize we had victims of the system living in places that our senators wouldn't stay in if you paid them.

"What'd this building used to be?" Booth asked.

Fran had to think about it for a second. "Plumbing supply, I think."

Brennan elbowed Booth's arm. "Pipes," she whispered in reminder.

We reached the steps up to the entry and Booth stopped in front of the orchids I'd noticed. Fran and Kevin had walked right by them, which made me question how long the flowers had been there. They looked a little wilted, but still pretty decent. "Bones?" He pointed down. "Dylan, right?"

Now that we were closer, it was easier to see that it was a shrine, not just an attempt at sprucing things up. There were other wild flowers lain on their sides, some petals scattered decoratively, and a small tea candle that had been lit to burn until it ran out of wick. Now the melted wax had hardened and sat in its steel cup uselessly. Leaning on the next step was a paperback copy of _Romeo and Juliet._

I looked up towards the roof of the building again. If someone had known Dylan had died, they must've either been there to see it happen - which meant they'd also seen whoever it was that rolled him up in the shroud. Even in the slums, a dead body wouldn't go unnoticed for very long.

Brennan canted her head and crouched down in front of the steps. "It's obviously a kind of shrine," she stated, reaching for the book. She opened the front cover and read a black Sharpie note on the inside. "'To my Juliet from your Romeo. Love, Dylan.'"

I sighed and looked around. "Kelly's been here."

Fran sat down on the steps higher up, then wrapped her arms around her knees. Kevin leaned on the old banister. I wouldn't lean on the dirty banister if I'd been offered money to do it. "It's something the kids do for each other when somebody dies," Fran offered, bowing her head in respect.

"You know, there could still be traces of Dylan's blood on the concrete." Booth looked down at the sidewalk we'd walked on during our path here. It made me swallow to think that we might've tread in the place where he'd landed and lost his life. "I'll call the crime scene unit."

Brennan carefully placed the book back where it had been. "Tell them to start on the fifth floor," she commanded as she rose.

"Why?"

"Because the injuries show that's how far he fell."

 _Smash!_ Shattering glass rang and splintered on the concrete underneath one of the dirty first-floor windows. I raised my arms to protect my face on impulse, keeping my feet planted right where they were. This wasn't an environment where it was necessary, let alone safe, to chase everyone who started running. We were blocking the stairs, and like the boys had said, Booth is very obviously a fed. The window must've seemed like the best second option to someone who feared being taken in.

Footsteps fell hard and fast, passing behind me. I spun quickly so my back wasn't to them and saw a grey hoodie and baggy green shorts sprinting past as quickly as he could, the hood pulled up over his head. He looked thin and scrawny, and his legs were thin, but he _ran._

"Hey, hey!" Booth yelled after him, then turned back to Brennan and me and pointed after the kid. "That's Dylan's school jacket!"

Brennan looked to see for herself and, with no discussion or comment, took off at the fastest possible speed. I threw my arms up exasperatedly, but had to stop and nod slightly as I acknowledged that, despite how quickly our window-breaker had been running, Brennan's dash was highly effective and gaining on him.

"We're not gonna hurt you!" She called loudly, running faster.

"Stop yelling!" I yelled, then realized _I_ was yelling, and groaned into my hands. "It's not helping…"

Though it was like watching something painful, I picked my head up again and watched as Brennan caught up with the boy. She managed to grab onto the extra fabric on the hoodie and yanked it back. It slowed down the kid and pulled him off-stride, which let her get enough ground to body-check him and tackle him to the ground. She straddled him quickly, hooked her ankles under his shins to keep him down, and leaned over with her hands on his shoulders.

"Okay," she stated, sounding sorry. It was harder to hear once people were finally done making a scene and shouting at each other. "I hurt you _a little bit,_ but that's only because you ran."

I started clapping sarcastically. "Great. Great!" Booth cringed and was still grimacing about the tackle when Brennan rolled off of the kid – who I could now see was a blond – and kept her hands fisted in the hoodie. She jerked him up and marched him back to us. My applause was accompanied by a smile about as authentic as the synthetic diamonds on the necklace Angela wore the other day. "Handled excellently. True professionals."

* * *

Booth took the kid by his upper arm and hauled him inside. He kept sending mean looks at Brennan and grumbling. I wasn't too pleased with how the situation was handled, either, but for the sake of solidarity, I followed behind my partners to offer backup. Fran and Kevin had decided they'd done enough and had left to go back to their van, though Booth wasn't thrilled about it.

Booth sat the kid down at a protruding window ledge – he made sure it was not the same one with the now broken window. As soon as he let go of the blond's arm, the youth twisted around, put his hands firmly on the bricks on both sides of his thighs, and stared defiantly back up at us. I slunk out of the way to stand aside like a mediator rather than one of the opponents.

"You can't ask me nothing without a social worker," the blond snapped, his legs shifting and fidgeting with the urge to move and run. "I know my rights!"

"Okay," I intervened before Booth even had the chance. I would've leaned on the wall, but I didn't trust it to be clean. Instead, I spread my legs enough to look confident and comfortable while keeping my arms crossed unobtrusively. "But does this feel like an interrogation?" I arched an eyebrow and then nodded back towards the front doors. The damp, mildew-y smell was stronger inside, so even if we were all pals, I'd still take the option to leave. "You want to walk, we won't chase you down again. You can leave."

Brennan looked up at me swiftly in confusion. Booth was getting into a pack of Stride Spearmint and ripping off the thin plastic wrapper. He balled it up and put it back in his pocket, then offered one of the sticks to the boy. He looked younger than me. Dylan's sweater practically swallowed him whole, and if it weren't for the belt cinched around his waist, his pants wouldn't have stayed up. His shoes were old, he didn't have socks, and his legs and arms were thinner than they should've been. Still, his green eyes were spirited and alert.

"Here, want some gum?" Booth offered to build rapport. I looked up to the ceiling some four feet over my head.

"Yeah." Having similar thoughts, the blond laughed derisively. "Like _that's_ gonna make me trust you."

I rolled my eyes. "Take the gum anyway." They all looked at me. I gestured to the Stride stick. "You saw him unwrap it. It's free gum."

Though he shook his head disbelievingly, he snatched the gum quickly and then leaned back into the window ledge. Booth took his hand back just as rapidly and put both in his pockets. "Hey, I'm just asking your name." The blond stared at him distrustfully, even as he stuck the gum in his mouth and started chewing.

It took a moment for him to decide that he cared enough to tentatively cooperate. "C," he answered guardedly.

Brennan was understandably skeptical as to whether or not that was his real name. "Does that stand for anything?" She asked. Instead of sounding rude like Booth might've, she sounded like she would take it as an unlikely but legitimate answer if he said no.

The boy kept chewing the gum. Despite what he'd said about how it wouldn't make him trust us, he was gradually relaxing as he realized he wasn't in trouble. The longer Booth went without cuffing him or talking about squatting or trespassing, the more willing he was to not cause issues. _Self-preservation._

He tipped his head sideways and answered Brennan, but kept his eyes off of Booth. "Carter," he decided to say. "I'm not saying if that's my first or my last name." He added with a hard glare at the fed.

I opted out of saying that, until he'd added that, we had no reason to believe that it wasn't just a made-up alias he'd pulled out of thin air. I figured that if he wanted to be a tough one, then he'd learn on his own sooner or later. The fact was that in this age, if we really wanted to know who he was, all we had to do was send a picture of his face to Angela and have her cross-check with digital records. Whether or not he gave us a name was mostly irrelevant if we really wanted to know.

"Why'd you run, Carter?" Booth asked, standing straight and with his arms crossed. It looked a little intimidating. It was almost exactly the way I was standing, but there's a big difference between a young woman in civilian clothes standing that way several feet away and a tall, fit cop within a yard.

Carter started to crack his knuckles. "Because this lady was chasing me!"

Brennan defensively retorted, "Because you ran!"

"Yeah," he sassed. "It's a real brain twister."

I looked down while I started to smirk. I kind of liked Carter. It seemed he was a little smarter than I'd given him credit for – to give the real answer of why he ran, which I suspected was that he didn't want to get in trouble, he'd have to all but confess that he was doing something he could get in trouble _for._ All Booth could accuse him of doing now was being a smartmouthed brat.

Booth looked straight at me when I looked up, a frown and stern reprimand on his face. _This isn't funny._ I shrugged and disagreed that yeah, it kind of was.

"That sweatshirt you're wearing belongs to a kid by the name of Dylan Crane." Booth was still displeased with the way that this interrogation was going so far, and it showed in his tone. He was far less sociable and polite than he'd been only moments ago when offering chewing gum.

Carter had started gesturing before Booth had even finished talking. "Never heard of him."

"Where did you get it?" Brennan pestered.

Carter stared between them oddly for a few seconds, then must've decided that he just didn't care enough to stay here longer than he had to. He began pulling his arms in through the sleeves. "I'm done with the hoodie," he announced, ducking his head and stripping out of it. "You guys can have it."

While he was taking it off, his black undershirt started to come with it. As it rode up on his torso, his ribs became visible – not just in the sense that his skin was bared, but as in, I could see a faint impression of where each rib was, and there were pale bruises, steal healing, mottled just underneath his ribcage. Booth had to look away.

I cleared my throat and held a hand out. Carter send a sideways glance at me, then tossed the sweatshirt. I caught it easily and draped it over my arm to carry more comfortably. I would've been more concerned about evidence integrity, but if Carter had been wearing it for even just the last twenty-four hours, it was already incredibly compromised. The odds of getting DNA off of it that fit our murderer were slim to none, and tying that DNA to the court case would be nearly impossible.

His undershirt was just a sleeveless wife beater. A pair of sunglasses were hooked to the neckline. There was a small rip under his left arm. Along with smaller bruises and a much older scar on his shoulder, there were inked lines of names on the inside of his right forearm. They had smeared slightly like they were made with marker instead of tattoo ink. The others, of course, noticed. Carter made no move to hide them. In fact, it was like he'd forgotten they were there.

 _Warren, Weiss, Harvey, Monro._

"What's with the, uh…" Booth held out his own arm and gestured. "Names on the inside of your arm there? What does that mean?"

Carter looked down and circled his skinny wrist with his other hand, holding his arm a little closer. "Guys I killed," he answered snidely.

 _Of course, maybe he's not that smart after all._ Bragging about homicide, even if it is a blatant lie, is not the best way to stay out of trouble with a cop.

"It's a list of foster homes," Brennan explained after tugging on Booth's sleeve. "The ones that threw him out."

Carter's eyes flashed, just daring any of us to offer pity. He sat a little bit taller. "Sometimes getting thrown out is-"

"-Is the best thing that can possibly happen." I finished for him before he had to, shooting Booth and Brennan both a long look saying to drop it. It wasn't relevant to our case. I felt a kinship with Carter that neither of them could understand, and while it wasn't enough to make me at all attached, it _was_ enough for me to not want old wounds unnecessarily prodded at.

Carter moved his hands behind him and leaned back, looking up at me and blinking in surprise. The tough demeanor was still there, but it wasn't as strongly enforced. "You were in the system?" He asked me in a less harsh voice.

Brennan nodded wordlessly. I reached for the sleeve of my jacket and pulled it up to the elbow on my right arm, showing the evidence of old burns and cuts. I turned my arm over for him to get an idea of how extensive it was before pulling my sleeve back down.

Brennan pointed to Carter. "Booth, the sunglasses. They're the same ones that Dylan was wearing."

Rolling his eyes but getting with the program, Carter unhooked the glasses from his shirt and threw them to me. I hadn't been expecting it, but I caught them by one of the arms with minimal fumbling.

"Ray Bans," I noted the brand name aloud.

"Bans, huh?" Booth whistled. "Top of the line. How can you afford those?"

Carter chuckled darkly. "You don't want to know." It was another stupid bluff, designed to make people back off, but it didn't work on people who carried guns. Brennan was starting to look irritated by all of the deflections. "Can I go now?"

"No," Booth flatly replied. "Child Services in on the way."

I looked up at him quickly, biting my tongue. He hadn't even called anyone, and Brennan hadn't left our sides, which meant there actually was no Child Services representative coming. Lying to Carter for information was one thing, but making a remark like that was just mean. If Child Services would help people in his situation instead of making things worse, there wouldn't be children making the choice to live in this very building.

Carter clenched his fists behind his back. I knew it was something that really bothered him because, despite the visceral reaction, he tried to keep us from seeing – which he would've succeeded at doing, if I had been in front of him rather than watching from the sidelines. He didn't want to make it obvious that he would be willing to do something to stay away from Child Services, lest that be exploited unreasonably.

He swallowed hard and started looking for an exit strategy. Booth saw and chuckled, putting his hands on his hips and taking a step closer, narrowing the spaces Carter could try to slip through if he tried to escape. "I don't think so, buddy."

"I tell you something, you let me go?" Carter bargained, breaking.

It seemed silly to be so afraid of an organization with a good initiative, but the truth was that abuse cases were very hard to prove. I had personal experience with Child Services earnestly trying to help, and only making things worse. When I hadn't waited until I had damning, terrible physical abuse that couldn't be explained away as clumsiness or accidents, I had gone for help. But because the damage wasn't serious enough, there wasn't enough cause to remove me from the environment, and the fosters were…

Well, I'd tried to blow the whistle on them. Predictably, it went very badly for me when I was left alone with them again. It was entirely possible Carter was in a similar situation.

I understood what Booth was doing. We wanted information, which meant we needed leverage. And we needed as much of a promise as we could get that it would be an honest trade. The thought that Kelly might still be alive and in danger was the reason I held my tongue on just outright agreeing.

"Only way to know is to tell us," I said, my eyes and expression darkening. I looked to the wall, repulsed by myself for perpetuating a lie meant to scare. _Especially a lie like this._ If it could help someone whose life might be in danger, it was worth it, but that didn't make me feel any less like a terrible person.

Carter nodded. "You want to know what happened to Dylan and Kelly? Check out the sandwich pervs."

My eyebrows flew up, as did Brennan's, and although Booth registered surprise and took an _is-that-so?_ expression with Carter, none of us said anything about his slip. We hadn't shown him Kelly's photo or mentioned her name. The only way he would've known she was involved is if he'd known the two beforehand, like Fran and Kevin, and knew they would be too embroiled in each other to leave each other out of drama.

 _Sandwich pervs?_ I tilted my head slowly. That was harsh language. It had an accusation to it that I wasn't a fan of. It didn't sound like crude insults someone would typically use. There was revulsion in Carter's voice and face when he mentioned them, like he truly believed they were perverts. Which, in this scenario, led to some disturbing thoughts regarding the adolescents they spent their free time helping.

I didn't want to consider that there was something to it, but I'd heard a lot of insults and a lot of crass language, and I'd gotten good at picking out when something was a throwaway taunt and when there was truth or meaning behind something else. Due diligence and responsibility was what convinced me that I'd have to ask Booth to look into them both a little more closely, even though it would mean negating how I'd gotten onto him about busting them on the street. If there was even a hint of truth to what Carter believed, then there was a serious problem.

"Pervs?" I repeated, just to poke a little deeper. I was kind of glad the two had gone back to their van now. "They're good Samaritans. Why the name-calling?"

Carter leaned over and folded his elbows over his knees. "I don't know," he tried to say, writing it off. I shook my head that that wasn't going to fly and he sighed, feet jumping anxiously. "Look, you hear it sometimes. People see the guy without his wife and then girls who were here more stop coming. Or they have to steal to get their Plan B, if you get it."

He shrugged his shoulders more robotically. He was as uncomfortable talking about it as I was hearing about it. Plan B was one of the commercial names for a morning-after contraceptive available at drugstores without prescriptions. Brennan opened her mouth as if to protest, but when she saw that Booth was taking Carter seriously and looking like he was regretting his lunch, she closed her mouth and looked away, horrified.

If I hadn't been spending so much of my time around dead bodies, I probably would've felt a little sick. Not much makes me nauseous since seeing Penny Hamilton's body after the dogs were let loose on her – hell, after seeing the dogs chomping at their bits to be let loose on _me._

"Officially, we can't let you go, but say we turn our backs for a minute…" I told him, trailing off meaningfully.

Carter smirked. "Thanks." It didn't feel like much, but it was more gratitude than I'd expected. He jumped up and slipped right past Booth, almost toying with him as he walked right out from in front of him. " _Won't_ catch you later."

* * *

Booth didn't even mention Carter when he was sorting out how to explain the progress of the case, which I appreciated more than I wanted to let on. I knew part of the reason Booth was so eager to have me move in with Brennan was because he was afraid I'd panic and go to ground. He also knew that I had the know-how and the ability to get off the grid, at least long enough to get far away from DC. Seeing that he'd give someone else the opportunity didn't make me feel anything but a little relaxed, assured that he was worried because he knew me, not because all foster kids were flight risks.

I spent more time in the bureau than Brennan, so I learned long ago that the kitchenette's coffee was a lost cause. She sipped some from a disposable cup and made a dissatisfied face. There was a coffee place not too far away from the Hoover building's plaza, and even though it was more expensive, it was ten times better than the stuff they tried to pass as decent when they bought it in bulk stock for the agents. I heard rumors floating around the offices that the units up in white-collar had better treasures in their cabinets, but a suitable excuse to find out for myself hadn't yet presented itself. Cybercrimes were reputed to have the freshest brews, but white-collar supposedly bought the top-shelf stuff. Also, Brett wanted to propose to his long-time girlfriend. If you know where to unobtrusively sit, it's surprising what you can pick up from gossip.

Anyway, digressing from coffee, Booth took one look at Brennan's expression and nodded his agreement silently. Moving past that, he joined us right outside of his office and made a gesture towards the right. I moved in between him and the wall. Brennan, closest to the aisle, looked at the folder Booth offered her with one hand.

"Fran Duncan's clean," he reported, sounding almost disappointed. I thought I saw his ears start to turn rosier. He'd looked pretty silly in hindsight. "Great record in the community – but Kevin Duncan? The kid got it right. I mean, he's a perv. He's been inside three times on solicitation of a minor charges."

"Freak," I grumbled. Children are _not_ sexy. They're the opposite. They're loud and whiny and messy and needy.

"Boys or girls?" Brennan asked, pushing the folder back at Booth. Now that she knew more details on what was in it, she didn't want it very close to her. I appreciated that she acknowledged the possibility that boys could be victimized, too. Generally, it's not as accepted that both sexes can be taken advantage of.

"Girls," Booth reported with a grimace. "He's a traditionalist."

"He's a freak," I corrected without blinking. "Traditionalists have turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving. Child molesters are freaks." I was no stranger to unwanted attention, and while I didn't consider it 'solicitation of a _minor,_ ' it was very unwelcome. I just called it harassment. Still, comparing photographs of myself to photographs of thirteen-year-olds reveals a dramatic difference – I look young, but older than I am. "The bastard approaches Kelly, Dylan intervenes to protect her, and Kevin attacks him."

I decided I liked that option. Kevin had always been the quieter of the couple. I had thought the main reason he had been reserved around me was because he was intimidated. I'd met the charitable pair because another street kid took me to them for first aid supplies after I was injured with a knife while defending myself walking home after dark, and instead of letting anyone see I was in pain, I just behaved aggressively and sharply. It bothered me that I hadn't gotten any creepy vibes from him. What if Fran _hadn't_ been there each time? What if there hadn't been his wife to prevent him from trying anything? Physically, I could take the guy, but maybe not if he had a weapon.

"And Kelly goes into hiding." Brennan concluded thoughtfully, swirling her coffee cup slightly.

"Unless he was pissed enough to kill her, too," I remarked, biting my tongue. I'd seen photos of the girl. She wasn't very small. She and I had a similar build, and I couldn't really see Kevin winning a lone fight with _two_ teenagers my size. Even if he had a gun, a love-crazed couple might not have backed down from defending each other.

Booth stopped in front of the open doorway to his office. Why we didn't just take the extra five steps into his office was beyond me. He turned around to face us and I took a step back to make more room.

"So, what do you want to do next?" He asked, holding his hands – and the folder – in front of him with a charismatic and amicable smile.

Brennan hummed cynically while she regarded him with skepticism and narrowed eyes. I looked away, knowing what I wanted: I wanted to interrogate Kevin and find Kelly. Sorting out the details of Dylan's death could wait until Kelly was safe, assuming she was still alive. One kid was already dead and that couldn't be changed – but I didn't want to sit around while that number increased to two.

"That's up to _Cam,_ isn't it?" She asked Booth rhetorically and unhappily.

"No, Bones," Booth patiently corrected. "I asked _you."_ He lifted the folder and poked her in the arm with one of the corners. "What do _you_ want to do?"

"I think…" She shifted, having not expected to be asked. She changed her coffee to the other hand and rubbed her now free one on her thigh. "I think we shouldn't close off any avenue of investigation," she decided. "We stay on all the evidence and see where it leads us. Like we did _before_ Cam," she couldn't help but finish. I got the impression that Booth had probably been asking her what lead she wanted to follow, but Brennan's answer pretty much summed up our general opinion on how to solve crimes.

Booth agreed gracefully. "Okay." Then, swiftly, he changed topics. "Do you have a list like Carter?"

"Of foster families that didn't work out?" Surprise flashed on her face for a moment, but she dismissed it quickly. "Yeah. We all did." I surveyed my favorite federal agent very carefully. His consideration and attitude when he asked what Brennan wanted to pursue didn't feel organic, especially not when combined with a personal question she probably wouldn't have answered if she hadn't been shown that consideration. "I… I wrote mine on the bottom of a shoe."

Booth looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. I sucked in on my cheeks and crossed my arms. No matter how nice he was, there were some things I wasn't prepared to answer. There was a lot tied up in a person's last names and their family ties. There were identities I wished I'd never had to have, and there were identities I wish maybe I had had the chance to have – Holly Booth probably wouldn't be nearly as traumatized as I am. It wasn't a discussion I was opening, and if he wanted to have it that badly, he'd have to be brave enough to approach it directly, not try to quid-pro-quo me into sharing on my own.

After a few seconds, Booth raised his eyebrows, but didn't comment on my refusal to answer the unspoken question. "You know…" he started to say, turning back to Brennan. "They say that foster kids… well, they're really hard on themselves."

"They?" Brennan dryly repeated.

"Yeah. Experts, psychologists, like that." Brennan groaned her annoyance when the dreaded -ology field came up. Booth held his hands up innocently. "Apparently, foster kids feel so alone in this mean world that they lose that _knack_ of just trusting other people."

I didn't consider "just trusting" to be a knack; I considered it a naivety. It's not safe to "just trust" the people you meet in the real world. That's why children have their parents teach them what to look out for and what to do when they don't feel safe. Trusting people on instinct is dangerous.

"That surprises you?" I snorted. If he was _shocked_ that some foster children had trust issues, then he probably wasn't equipped to be an investigator. I was far from the only child of the system that had spent their life being neglected and abused.

"They think they've got the weight of the world. It's profound." Booth pushed, but then immediately shrugged as if he didn't know what he was talking about, nominalizing how serious the topic had become. I crossed my arms tighter and literally bit my tongue. I was not enjoying this talk. "They say that they have a hard time letting themselves off the hook. They grow up with control issues."

I huffed quietly and shook my head. _I don't believe this._ So much for subtlety.

"Our professional interactions with our new boss are none of your business," I told him in no uncertain terms. Saroyan was not one of his field partners, nor was she someone he got reports from. The forensic evidence was fenced through Brennan. "And for that matter, w _e_ choose what to tell you and when. These things are personal. You don't try to choose what and how much we say for us and then engineer the situation so we feel more like doing it – no matter what your intentions are."

 _Manipulation_ was a harsh word to use, but the way he'd approached everything… I felt snubbed. He had one very obvious point to make, and instead of showing us the respect of just saying it, he'd had to beat around bushes, make things complicated, and talk about things he didn't really understand, applying more generalizations to foster kids in the process. Not all of us lost that innocence or brightness. Not all of us suffered. The foster system was good sometimes – it took people out of bad situations and put them in safe ones where they could flourish. He couldn't act like we were all the same and use it as a way to try to make his own point.

Maybe it was acceptable for him to do what he'd done. I didn't know. I could admit to myself that my relationships were weird. I didn't know what was okay and what wasn't – there were grey areas I was unfamiliar with. This was one of them. I just knew that I felt very uncomfortable with what he'd tried to do, and I wanted him to know so that he wouldn't do it again. I _hoped_ he wouldn't do it again. I _hoped_ he'd respect my boundaries on this as well as he respected my boundaries about being touched.

I uncrossed my arms and walked away.

* * *

Booth and I took Kevin Duncan into the interrogation room, and although Booth didn't really want anything to do with the man, I just wanted to get the interrogation over with – not because pedophilia disgusted me (although it definitely does) but because I didn't think I'd enjoy interrogating someone I'd known before I got used to the safety and the authority that this room gave me. It certainly didn't help that I still itched to just get out of the FBI for a while – the talk in front of the office, if it could be called that, left me feeling confined within the bureau walls.

Booth opened the interrogation for me. He brought up the charges against him of propositioning minors. Thankfully, Kevin seemed like his "type" was at least past puberty. It wasn't exactly better, but little kids were worse. What was the term for it? Hebophile? I knew there was a term, I'd heard it on some police show somewhere.

"All my mistakes were made _before_ I met Fran. Then I fell in love." Kevin raised his shoulders and then let him fall again, keeping his eyes on Booth, who paced along the length of the room behind the interviewee's chair. That must've been really unnerving for Kevin. What unnerved me was that while he didn't seem angry or sad, he also didn't have any benevolent reaction when he talked about falling in love. It was just said like a fact. If you're trying to be honest and bare your soul so you're believed, then you should try letting a bit more of your feelings through. "Love changes everything."

"Except fetishes," I said, almost apologetic, before I reminded myself not to be. I shouldn't apologize to someone for accusing them of pedophilia when I have legal proof that they are, in fact, a pedophile. It's not my fault that they have an illegal fetish. It's not theirs, either, but what _is_ their fault is their poor judgment and/or lack of self-control that allowed them to act on it. "Those are psychological, not emotional."

Booth paused a few feet to Kevin's left and looked down on him. He wasn't handcuffed, but his hands were kept demurely in his lap. "Your wife know about these mistakes?"

"Of course," Kevin rolled his eyes. Not quite the reaction we wanted from the people we interrogated. We preferred more meekness and amicability. "We have no secrets. I got counseling. I'm still _in_ counselling," he corrected himself. "I'm out there on the street making amends every day."

That was a nice thought and all, but passing out some first aid supplies to needy kids wasn't going to make up for the damage he caused others when he took away something that should be special and entirely consensual either by force or manipulation. Virginity is a social construct, but that doesn't mean it's not important. Whether or not young girls place a large precedence on it, their first time having sex is something they're going to remember, just like their first kiss or their first date, and if they learn from that experience to associate something they have the right to enjoy with negative feelings, then a large part of their sexuality and self-confidence may be compromised.

"Passing out sandwiches and aspirin and condoms to street kids?" Booth sounded like he didn't fully believe him. I couldn't really blame him. Realistically, what else could he do? In essence, though, that sounded pretty small compared to what he'd actually done.

"Yeah," he said, looking up a bit belligerently at Booth's tone, then sighed and looked down again. At least he was getting with the program. "I have no direct contact with the kids. Fran does. I make the sandwiches, I drive, I ensure my wife's safety. That's a tough part of town."

"You knew that girl's name when Booth sent the kids running," I pointed out. I'd very clearly noticed him calling for a long-haired blonde girl who took one look at the federal agent and ran off in the other direction. "Katie, right?"

"I hear them talk," he explained, his jaw tensing with impatience. "They trust my wife, and sometimes they give her their names."

"And your past is all in the past?" Booth raised an eyebrow at me over Kevin's head. He had a particularly strong issue with this guy. Not that I could blame him.

"No," Kevin said very strongly, putting more emphasis on that than he had on anything else. "That's with me every day."

"Yeah…" Booth sarcastically agreed. He flicked his wrist towards me in indication and I took the cue. From an envelope in my lap, I pulled out three photographs of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls in the foster care system. Two were brunettes and one had light ginger hair, and all had green eyes. Booth stalked up behind Kevin's chair and pointed at each picture I lined up as he said their names. "Miranda Tyler. Susan Price. Laura Costello. All these girls say that you traded sandwiches for sex in the past six months."

Kevin didn't _look_ like he recognized any of them, but he looked over the images longer than I would've if I were looking at people I didn't know who'd accused me of statutory rape. "Well, they're street kids." He said it with a hint of derision and finally looked up from the table. "They lie."

I took in a breath and glared. Saying they were lying was one thing. Saying it as if being street kids had anything to do with why they lied pissed me off. Not long ago, I was one of them. I wouldn't have lied about someone raping me. It's a really serious offense.

 _He's just like Saroyan,_ I thought with an internal snarl. _Is that what everyone sees me as?_ Was that why the media picked up on me so quickly and held on? Because I was supposed to be some street brat that screwed up and created an even better headline? Because it was a novel idea that a kid from a broken home could be anything other than a druggie, a drinker, a prostitute, or a deadbeat liar?

"They also look out for each other!" I snapped furiously. I wished Saroyan was there. I'd have yelled at her, too – _don't generalize us. Don't categorize me. We're not what you think we are!_ "Just because I'm not in that situation doesn't mean I don't remember exactly what it's like. Think carefully before you tell me that they're lying about a creep taking advantage of their vulnerability!"

"Yeah," Booth agreed strongly with me, shooting lasers at the top of Kevin's head with his eyes. He didn't even seem surprised when I aligned myself with the girls whose pictures were lying on the table. Come to think of it, he wasn't too surprised that I was half-siding with Kelly Morris, either. I wouldn't object to arresting her if we had proof, but as it was, I was forced to play devil's advocate when what I should really be called was a reasonable human being who didn't automatically accuse an unfortunate teenager of murder just because she doesn't have a traditional, loving family.

Kevin pushed the pictures away, lying his forearm over all of them and pushing back on the table. "These girls came onto _me,"_ he argued, looking up into my eyes with agitation. I felt anger coursing through my veins. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to kick him under the table or swing for his face. "They wanted money. When I rejected them, they got angry."

"Oh, so now they're prostitutes, _Saint Duncan?!"_

"When we catch up with Kelly Morris," Booth interrupted the molester before he could respond to my heated, fuming challenge. "Is she gonna say the same thing?"

* * *

 **A/N: Well. It's... it's been a while. I'm sorry... I don't really have an excuse, other than that finals kicked my ass and I dedicated a lot of time to "Lie a Little Better," which is about done. The final chapter goes up this Friday. (Yay! One fewer WIP, one more goal met!)**


	15. The Boy in the Shroud, Part Four

I was really starting to get sick of being called like a dog whenever Saroyan wanted attention, but what grated on my nerves even more was that not only did Brennan agree with my position, but she was coming when called, too. We didn't really have too many other options, but it was still insanely aggravating to feel like I was on a leash. I listened to Booth now because I trusted him – and before that, I'd done so because of circumstance, not because I was risking much by disobeying. With Saroyan, I had too much to lose. It was the flip side of working my way into the Jeffersonian. My new boss could take away the privileges I had worked so hard to earn.

Saroyan had some of the evidence on her table while she collected swabs and ran everything from DNA testing to toxicology reports on organs, trace evidence, and even what remained of the shroud Dylan had been found wrapped up in. There wasn't anything Angela, Brennan, or myself were useful for in the room. It made me feel even more like a puppy called for entertainment. I couldn't even be of use to the case in this room – and although I knew it was ridiculously competitive and hostile to think so, I couldn't help but feel bitter that she might be setting me up to fail by removing me from situations in which I could help.

She picked up a neon green hair brush with a soft, rubbery grip, hands gloved. "The hairbrush from Kelly's room provided her DNA." Strands of blonde hair were wrapped around some of the bristles. Saroyan put it down on a steel tray to the side, stripped her gloves off, trashed them, and leaned back on the clear counter behind her. "The nail polish from her room also matches the nail polish we found in the scratch marks on the victim's arm."

"It doesn't mean she pushed him out the window," Brennan promptly pointed out, her arms crossed. I nodded and had to consciously remind myself not to also cross my arms.

"If Hodgins finds it, and it matches the rust found in the scratch marks, then we can tie Kelly to the weapon." Angela suggested.

I usually had a lot of patience for Angela and Zach, more so than anyone else on the team, but although the artist was merely speculating, it still felt like she was attacking Kelly. There were a multitude of explanations for the limited evidence we had, especially considering that we knew there was a lot we were missing. Assuming that the foster child was still responsible for assaulting and/or murdering her boyfriend was just making me ready to kick someone's ass.

I couldn't have been the only one feeling that way – Brennan, also, is willing to hear Angela out to a greater extent, and has a much milder temperament with Zach than she does with Booth, yet even the anthropologist sent an exasperated glare at the forensic artist. Angela was doing her job, and Saroyan calling us here to reconvene and share evidence was her doing _her_ job; but when everyone's job seemed to line up in a position to go after someone I personally related to, it felt a lot more personal, and a lot more harmful.

Saroyan crossed her arms. "Oh, young love," she chuckled and reminisced, body turned to Angela. "You pour your soul out to some pimple-faced jock with a great body and the emotional maturity of an eleven-year-old, only to get your heart broken in the back of a red Camaro."

I frowned and tried to imagine exactly what being in a car had to do with it, and then couldn't decide if it was because the boy _had_ a car and that was somehow significant or if it was a car-sex thing. I still wasn't very convinced that high schoolers (or anyone younger) really had the capacity to manage serious relationships, but then, I knew that my cynicism was far from the norm. Besides, high school isn't a time for serious relationships, anyway; I just couldn't see the point in wasting someone's time with a relationship they didn't plan on being serious about.

I chanced a look at Brennan. She didn't seem to be following much of that, either.

"Remember that first slow dance?" Angela asked, drumming her fingertips on her upper arms and laughing.

Saroyan chuckled. "Oh, God…"

"Some… _horrible_ … power ballad."

"Oh, and that special boy with a pipe in his pocket."

I couldn't _quite_ tell if that was a euphemism or not, but I was betting it was. Or maybe it was a drug thing and they were talking about marijuana. Listening to them made me uncomfortable – not because of euphemisms, but because I felt so out of place and confused. I couldn't relate to their experiences and had nothing to add. It seemed like such a universal thing to get nostalgic about, but I'd missed so many high school opportunities for so many reasons.

"Oh, Lewis Cole." Angela stared off towards the rinsing basin on the counter at the far wall and sighed. I strongly doubted she was actually looking at the sink. "Mm. He was a drummer," she elaborated to Saroyan, who pointed back at her like him being a percussionist was all Angela needed to say. "He had this hair – it was-"

Brennan interrupted, raising her hand slightly. "Wait, _excuse me,_ marching to the beat of a different drummer here." I thanked her silently for cutting in, and I even did the gracious thing and didn't speculate over whether or not the mistake in the phrase was an accident or tailored to the context. "I'd like Hodgins to identify the species of rose found in Dylan Crane's hand."

Saroyan clearly didn't appreciate having been interrupted, but instead of saying something about it, she curtly tilted her head and responded, "What can that possibly tell us?"

I raised my eyebrows. Hadn't she seen by now that particulate analysis was important? Without it, we wouldn't have been able to find vital information in the Richardson case. "It's impossible to tell until we have that information." While there wasn't any guarantee that we'd find something unexpected, there was every chance that we _might._ We had a responsibility to pursue every lead.

"I'd prefer he keeps looking for the pipe." Saroyan expressed this levelly. Her words may have suggested it was an opinion, but her tone and expression made it clear that she was stating what was going to happen. "It could have Kevin Duncan's DNA on it."

Although I _was_ glad that she wasn't convinced anymore that Kelly was the murderer, it still irked me that she was so focused on finding evidence for court. I realized that that was part of her job, but shouldn't her first priority be _identifying_ the murderer, rather than having a suspect convicted? "Which proves Kevin attacked Dylan," I admitted, "But not necessarily killed him." Because the cause of death hadn't been the trauma, it had been the fall. The two were likely administered at the same time, but we had nothing except logic and circumstance dictating that. "The _rose_ could give us a closer location and quite possibly narrow down suspects through accessibility."

Brennan held a hand out to me to indicate her agreement. "Ergo, I want Hodgins on the rose." She restated.

"It's my call." Saroyan returned, less amicable than she'd been before. "No."

I crossed my arms, for once stopping and trying to figure out the best way to proceed. My initial response was to take an attitude and fight for my point, but I had a very strong feeling that that wasn't the right way to go with Saroyan. I could dislike her all I wanted, but I had to respect her stubbornness and confidence.

On the other hand, what I couldn't respect was not being a team player. I went out of my way to try being one, but she just kept slighting me, slighting suspects, and now slighting even Brennan's experience and intellect. Maybe there _was_ a good reason to look for the pipe – and yes, I agree that we should try to isolate and identify it – but that pipe wasn't going to go anywhere, and there were a million just like it. It would be more time-consuming to identify, as well as possibly much less vital.

Brennan put her arms down, her face showing more frustration and incredulity than she ever liked to show at once. It was to my shock that she was the one to lose her cool first. "I can't work like this," she said aloud to Angela, turning her eyes back to Saroyan mutinously.

Saroyan seemed taken aback, but only for a second. "Are you telling me I should start looking for your replacement?"

Angela's jaw had dropped, but she quickly regained her wits. "Dr. Saroyan," she said, interrupting swiftly before things could escalate. She crossed her arms. The camaraderie that the women had shared just moments ago seemed to dissipate. "I don't want to be overly dramatic or anything, but if you lose Brennan, you lose us all."

The loyalty was touching, but that felt dramatic. And it was a huge bluff – one that Saroyan could easily choose to call her on. And if it _wasn't_ a bluff, that was even worse – Angela, Hodgins, and Zach shouldn't give up their employment because one team member quits.

"Really?" Saroyan looked at Angela, not surprised by the support behind Brennan, but seemingly bothered by how quickly it was looking like a three-versus-one argument.

" _Really,"_ Angela stressed with certainty. Then she added, "And Booth, too."

My heart thumped rapidly. It surprised me that it wasn't audible to the others. When Saroyan turned her eyes to me in a stern question, I knew I would hold my ground, but it didn't stop me from feeling incredibly anxious. I was grateful for my internship and didn't want to lose it; but, ultimately, my loyalties were of a higher priority to me, and I wasn't going to sacrifice bonds and relationships for the sake of continuing to work under a boss I couldn't professionally cooperate with. Brennan, Booth, and the rest of the Jeffersonian team are the closest friends I have – the _only_ friends I have, really – and I can land on my feet without a job.

"I may have been hired by Dr. Goodman," I answered her unspoken inquiry without hesitation with a nod towards the anthropologist. "But I work under _her._ " The 'not you' was strongly implied.

Saroyan bit her tongue and looked down. I could see that the insubordination was grating on her patience and wondered if we were going to be fired on the spot. I pushed my hands into my jeans, feigning nonchalance, and had to consciously remind myself not to outwardly show signs of nervousness.

Finally, she looked up. The silence couldn't have lasted for more than twenty seconds. "In the interest of this investigation, I'm going to defer to you, Dr. Brennan." Saroyan's tone held an irate note of finality.

Brennan was the most surprised. Angela was mostly relieved, and I knew that the job was important enough to the pathologist that she was unlikely to fire members of her team in the middle of the case. Still, Brennan nodded slightly. "Thank you."

"Thank you," Angela sighed, dropping her arms down and letting her shoulders fall.

" _But_ ," Saroyan chimed in sharply. "I will start the search for your replacement."

All I could think was that Booth was going to flip.

* * *

It was easy to remember the times when I had avoided going to the FBI and hadn't been totally comfortable in the building. Truth be told, complete comfort was still out of reach, but I felt better in Booth's office than I did in the Medico-Legal lab anymore, and while that made me sad, I still took the opportunity to be in a place I liked more.

Booth had never objected to my company, and I was by now recognized and welcomed with smiles into the building. I still had to wear a visitor's pass, but at this point, the people who worked the regular shifts at the front desk knew me by name and face, so signing in was quick and no one ever questioned my presence very much. Anyone who did usually took it to Booth, and I imagine they were quickly shut down in their concerns.

"Help me understand this," Booth sighed, digging his fingers into his temples with his elbows on the desk. "You challenged her to _fire_ you?" I sighed and looked past him at the wall. Keeping it from him seemed like it would be inadvisable, and he'd probably have heard from someone else anyway. At least this way, he heard it from me and knew our side of the story – how Saroyan was neglecting to consider what we thought was important evidence.

"I didn't challenge her to fire me," I defended. When he said it like that, it sounded like I'd done something really dumb. "I argued in the best interest of the case and expressed my loyalty to Dr. Brennan." I shrugged. Yeah, I'd kind of challenged her to fire me if he looked between the lines – and Booth always did.

Booth sighed again, groaning at how the situation had escalated. I wished it hadn't come so far, but at the same time, I wasn't surprised. The pressure had been building up ever since Brennan returned from North Carolina, and things had been getting tenser and nastier, too – from going over my head, to subtly attacking my lacking credentials, to insisting that people in my situation were irresponsible and at fault, the offenses had been getting more and more vicious.

It was a complicated game to play and a hard line to toe. I was impressed how well Saroyan managed to do it, as well as by my own restraint. I have little to no patience for bureaucracy on a good day, but this was just such an important thing not to screw up that I had been trying hard to keep myself in check.

Things weren't my fault – or maybe they were. Maybe Saroyan had a point. Or maybe it was judgmental and biased of her to make the calls that she'd been making. It could be that I'd been too sensitive and touchy. Or it could be that she was being underhanded and a little petty. I had so much invested in the conflict, both personally and professionally, that I couldn't even be sure when and how often I'd been in the wrong anymore.

I held back the apology that was on the tip of my tongue. This climax had come from Brennan's outburst, not my own, and as much as I admired her, I was not going to take the responsibility for someone else's actions. Nor did I think she'd been out of place to do so, and I wasn't up for apologizing for a circumstance I believed was inevitable.

The agent had next to no idea what to say or how to react, other than to be frustrated. It was lucky for both of us that someone knocked on the door. Booth picked his head up and gestured over my shoulder at the person in the window, and an agent I had seen once or twice before pushed the door open.

"Agent Booth, Miss Kirkland." He nodded to us both formally.

"What's up?" I asked, relieved for the interruption.

The agent looked back and then stepped a bit away, pushing the door open further. Alex became visible, hiding on the man's other side and peering through the doorway through floppy blond bangs, hands in the big pocket at the front of his too-large hoodie. He met my eyes on accident and quickly looked away.

The man looked at the two of us with an arched eyebrow, no doubt wondering why we had such a young visitor who looked like he should've been in school. "This young man says he has information he won't tell anyone but you."

I stood up and vacated my chair, making a spot for Alex while freeing myself up to put my back to a wall. "Thanks, man," I replied casually to the agent, who nodded at Booth and then excused himself. Alex stood in the doorway, sucking on his lower lip. "Come on in with us. I promise we won't bite."

Booth stretched, forcing himself to lose the tension in his shoulders and appear friendly. "You want a coke or something?" He offered.

Alex crept inside and shook his head. After a moment's thought, he pushed the door shut until it very softly clicked. "No…" He chewed on the inside of his cheek and walked over to the chair, glancing at me. I waved towards it and he sat down, leaning forward over his knees. He looked small. "You a big shot?" He asked Booth seriously.

"Um, _yeah."_ He answered with a teasingly obvious tone and reached behind his monitor, moving his nameplate towards the front of the desk. "Look at that. _Special Agent_ Seeley Booth."

I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms, standing to Alex's right. "How'd you get here without Suzanne?" _And why?_

Alex looked down. "I took a bus," he said quickly. It made me suspect that Suzanne had no idea he had come, and I bit back a sigh. That couldn't be good – and maybe he'd stolen money from her wallet to pay the fares. Oh, well. That wasn't my concern, it was theirs. "Kelly called me…" he said, looking over his shoulder in paranoia. "On the phone."

"Oh." I uncrossed my arms and felt kind of bad for being too abrupt. I'd almost started to forget how rough the situation must be on the kid – getting a phone call from his runaway sister probably hadn't helped. "What did she say?"

Alex shrugged his shoulder minutely. He didn't want to talk about it, but I was glad he'd brought it to us. "That she's okay…" he answered. His shoulders fell further. "And that we'll be together. Soon." Although he added it almost hopefully, his down expression and the defeated slouch told me he didn't really believe it.

Booth looked over at me shortly before focusing his attention on Alex again. "Did she say where she was?" He asked gently. Alex didn't hesitate before shaking his head. I bit my tongue before I questioned if he'd even asked. "Did she know about Dylan? About him being dead?" Booth very gently said the D-word, like it was going to upset the kid even more now, and maybe it might have but he seemed far more concerned with the phone call.

The blond didn't even flinch when reminded that Dylan had died, but he hung his head. "Yeah…" His tone went up a bit and he made a quiet sniff that I don't think either of us were supposed to have heard. "She couldn't stop crying about it. She had to hang up." He lifted his right hand up to his face and rubbed his nose with the sleeve that dangled down past his hand. "I think she's lying," he said, louder and more upset. "I think she's never coming back."

I wished I couldn't relate to him, but I could. It reminded me of Aaron, how he'd promised I wasn't alone and then immediately enlisted. The asshole had left me alone after giving me the smallest hope that maybe I wasn't going to have to fend for myself all the time. Alex had already lost his parents, might be facing losing his home, and now he was going through an impossible third loss of his _sister,_ the only of his first family that he still had.

He started to cry and I felt even more useless. I was supposed to be helping. I was supposed to find Kelly and give him back his sister, put them back in their home, and make sure Dylan's killer got what they deserved. I couldn't do much about a kid crying, and I couldn't stop Kelly from hurting him. Besides, the phone call had been a goodbye, not an intentional attack.

It was a relief that Booth had his own child and was more accustomed to dealing with tears. He stood up, moved to the front of his desk, and sat on the edge only a couple feet from the boy, lowering his voice to a soft, reassuring murmur. "Hey, it's okay, Alex. Alright?" He reached for the kid's shoulder and when Alex didn't move, Booth rubbed his upper arm. "Everything's gonna be okay."

Alex sniffled miserably and rubbed his face on his sleeve again, his cheeks red. "I think I'm all alone now," he sobbed.

"You're not alone," I corrected, joining them around the chair and putting my hand on the back of the furniture. "I swear. We're going to find her, okay?" I knew we'd find her – I just prayed she wouldn't also be dead by the time we did. "And you have Suzanne, and if you ever need anything, you can come right to us, too."

My voice wasn't as sweet as Booth's. I didn't really cater to children in the same way. Alex was in a really sucky position and coddling him wasn't going to give him the ability to handle it, and given how serious things were, it probably wouldn't make it easier to cope, either. I could reassure, and I could make promises that I intended to keep, but I couldn't pretend everything was okay. Everything was _not_ okay. Over Alex's head, Booth gave me a solemn look, acknowledging that.

"Come on." The agent gave Alex's arm a squeeze and gently pulled, urging him to get out of the chair. "Let's get out of here. We'll give you a ride home, alright?"

Alex didn't look soothed by the promise, but he got up without fussing and covered his face, letting Booth walk him out of the office while he tried so hard to stifle his cries.

* * *

Booth's phone had gone off while we were in his SUV with Alex, but he'd sent it to voicemail after one more look at the red-faced and runny-nosed kid, shoving it back in his pocket and offering napkins collected in the center console. We escorted him back to Suzanne (with a pit stop at McDonald's, since Booth thought ice cream would cheer him up – it didn't really work) and as soon as we were back in the car, Booth groaned. To his credit, not many people get super psyched about being summoned.

Back at the lab, nothing seemed to be wrong, so I wasn't too sure why it had been such a hurry. "Why did we have to race here again?" I asked, irritated. I'd gone to see him to get _away_ from Saroyan, not right back into her domain.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. Before he could tell me to grow up or sarcastically comment on my memory, he caught the silver doorframe of the autopsy room and swung around to lean inside. "I got your call," he told the person inside.

I wasn't surprised it was Saroyan. "It was urgent," she stated, voice mild. It kind of annoyed me that she was perpetually upset with me even when I hadn't done anything than she was with Booth when he rejected her call. "Why didn't you answer?"

"We were–" I stopped and it felt like my voice died in my throat. I'd been halfway through saying we'd been occupied in a tone that would snidely imply I didn't prioritize her demands, but when I followed Booth into the autopsy bay, I saw not just my boss in scrubs and gloves, but a corpse I recognized very quickly laying on the slab.

Booth sighed and looked away from the table. "Kevin Duncan," he muttered. "Jeez." He seemed unsurprised, but greatly irritated. I stared at the man I'd known for the almost two years, fixated on the pallor in his face.

His skin looked light grey, except for his eyelids, which seemed whiter. I was used to dead bodies by now, but there was something unnamable about how it felt when it was someone I'd _known._ I'd seen this man move, speak, kiss his wife. I'd sat across from him and yelled at him just the other day. A messy, bloody hole was blown in the right side of his chest, either right through or very close to his heart, but the cause of death wasn't half as morbidly compelling as how _blank_ his face looked.

Booth said my name softly. "You okay?"

"Why wouldn't she be?" Saroyan asked tartly. I could imagine a variety of thoughts on her tongue, begging to be given a voice. _What's she doing in a lab if she can't handle a dead body? What's her purpose here if she needs to be babied?_

Before anyone got nasty, I piped up and stated evenly, "I knew him." I tore my eyes away from the dead man's face and looked up at Saroyan. "Before this case, I knew him." Her expression, whatever it had been before, must've shifted, because she was taken aback and sympathetic – almost apologetic for her earlier tone. I didn't want her guilt or her pity, but I decided reluctantly to just take it as her being a decent human being. I knew she wasn't totally awful. Taking a deep breath, I pulled my jacket tighter and urged her to move forward. "Not well, though, and thank God for that. I kind of fit his type." I shuddered, disgusted.

Neither of them said anything for a second. I could practically _feel_ Booth's hesitance to continue as normal with me in the room, like it was my own concern. Then – and I did not anticipate ever thinking this – Saroyan proved to know what I needed better than the FBI agent, briskly continuing like there was nothing out of the ordinary.

"Single gunshot wound to the chest," she said, taking out her different-sized scalpels and a plugged in but not running bone saw. "You're just in time for the autopsy."

* * *

Maybe it was weird that we could be totally fine working with actual bones, but didn't like it when there was still skin and muscle and blood and organs. Autopsy wasn't a place I'd spent much time, because I'd never worked closely with any of our Jeffersonian pathologists. I could've gone a very long time without requiring the experience I was gaining watching an autopsy in action.

Luckily for me, my discomfort was well-hidden and barely noticeable, especially when compared to Zach, who was watching Saroyan start up the bone saw while the deep, Y-shaped incision into Kevin Duncan's chest was held open with sterile, steel pins. His expression was one of morbid fascination combined with disgust. I could've done without the smell, but the sight didn't squick me out. It was pretty hard to squick me out, ever since finding Penny Hamilton's body after the dogs had been let at her. I had yet to see anything nearly as savage.

Booth groaned when the saw blade started cutting into the bones, separating the ribs from the clavicle. The grinding sound wasn't too unlike the sound of using a power tool on wood, but because of the flesh around the bones, the blades cut into the wet tissues and organs and made a little bit of blood spray up onto Saroyan's gloves. That made me frown, too, and I looked away.

 _Bones are definitely easier to handle._

I guess Zach fared even worse. "Feeling queasy, Zach?" Saroyan asked, sparing him a quick glance through the thick, transparent goggles on her face. Because Zach and I were standing close by, we were wearing them, too. Booth, having no role to play in the evaluation of the remains, stayed so far back that he was practically out of the room.

His face was set in a grimace. "I'm not used to bodies looking so much like _actual_ human beings," he answered, staring, like me, at the bones as Saroyan sawed through them. Macabre curiosities were running abound – except for Booth's, which were locked in a dank basement while he stayed far away, like a normal person. "Since this man was just killed and there's plenty of flesh, how is my presence beneficial?"

Saroyan pursed her lips, slowing the saw. She waited until the blade had fully stopped before lifting it from the body, moved it aside, and reached in. She took out the rib she'd just sawed off. The end looked surprisingly smooth, but under a microscope, it would have clear kerf marks. This particular rib she laid on the steel tray Zach had been told to hold – the bullet that had taken Kevin's life was lodged firmly in the bone.

"Your disturbance is entertaining," I answered for him lightly. It made my task of standing there with them much more bearable when I could just look over and remember, _well, however much this sucks, he's enjoying it less._

"The number six rib?" He questioned, looking down at the bone, relieved to have something familiar to look at instead.

Saroyan nodded and explained, "The bullet passed through his vital organs and lodged in the rear curvature. Get it out."

Zach turned around, moving his hands to the sides of the tray rather than under it. I stepped towards Saroyan's equipment cart, took off my goggles, and put them down next to the extras on the lower rack. "See you soon," I called, mostly to Booth, following after Zach. Bones were our thing when Brennan wasn't around to be called on.

 _Speaking of,_ I started to wonder, _I wonder what her plans are tonight._ Far from being rowdy partygoers, she and I tended to come and go from the apartment quietly as we pleased, but we collaborated on groceries, and I knew there were things we needed. I didn't want to overfill the fridge if she had already planned to make a stop. It still felt weird to think of Brennan in that sort of domestic, companionable sense, but it wasn't a _bad_ weird, and it was simultaneously a comfortable form of domesticity that I was alright with.

I reached for my pockets to send her a short text, but ended up patting empty jeans. I sighed, already recalling the last time I'd used it, and realized that I must've set it down without thinking next to the rinse station while tying my hair out of the way.

"Oh…" I said aloud, stopping in my path. Zach paused and turned to look at me, and I tried not to read into it – it wasn't too often that anyone but Brennan got his full attention when he was thinking about work. "You know what, I actually must've left my phone in the autopsy room. I'm gonna get it and meet you in the bone room."

Zach didn't really care. "Okay," he acknowledged. "Hurry up."

I mocked a salute, but didn't put my heart into it – he wasn't being rude, so there wasn't a need for an attitude. Besides, I still figured my _Romeo and Juliet_ performance met my daily sass quota for at least another two days.

The walk back was short, since I'd remembered my phone not long after leaving, and the hallway seemed to pass by even faster with a strict, determined purpose in my head: _recover phone, ask about groceries, find Zach._ It was nice to have concrete goals to focus on, especially when I had so much else going on. Between my new boss, my dying friend, and the ever-looming anxiety over the foreboding voicemail Brennan's father had left on the apartment line, I had more than enough to worry about.

Their voices were talking in the autopsy bay. The saw wasn't going, and when I reached the doorway, Booth wasn't in sight. He'd gone inside, which meant it wasn't a public conversation (why else would he voluntarily approach a body in mid-autopsy?), which naturally meant I wanted to be a sneak and stick my nose in where it didn't necessarily belong.

I crept up to the doorframe, but stopped before I was visible, listening from just outside and pressed close to the wall. Whatever my compulsion to eavesdrop was, it had served me decently in the past. Nosiness in general hadn't had many serious ramifications so far.

"Booth," Saroyan said. Her voice was thoughtful – hard to pin, other than that, what she was feeling. I wanted to lean towards pensive, but that wasn't quite it, either. She sounded quite sure what she wanted to say, and what she meant by it, and she didn't seem very concerned with the decision, either. "If Dr. Brennan were to quit-"

I caught my breath, biting into my lip hard. The stinging in the delicate flesh wasn't enough to make me let go. _What the hell?!_ Brennan wasn't _quitting._ She'd said she couldn't work under these conditions – the incohesive teamwork had to be proof enough that she really couldn't, not just that she was _being stubborn,_ or _quitting._ I'd been listening for less than one full sentence, and already I felt furious. Was she twisting the story to Booth? I wanted to be glad I'd shared with him already because it had seemed safe to confide with him, but the primary relief became that he'd heard the real story first.

"What?" The FBI agent asked, laughing at the prospect.

Saroyan bit back an irritated sound at being interrupted. "If she were to leave the Jeffersonian-" she rephrased, and, though still disgruntled, I relaxed a little. That wasn't nearly as bad.

"Well," Booth chuckled. Unalarmed and genial, it was like he didn't know it was a real possibility. Anxiety festered in my stomach like an open wound, usually banished to the background but bringing brought back forth as they discussed my mentor – and myself, by extension – losing our jobs. I reminded myself that Booth _did_ know, that I had _told_ him, and that he must have thought this would come up and was speaking like this for a reason. "The squints would flee this institution like the French army!"

I bit my tongue this time to keep from snickering. I had a mental image of Zach waving a white flag while backing up slowly, and Hodgins' smirk slowly falling while he assured the opposition that the cannon fire hadn't been a _real_ challenge.

She didn't stop to think about what that might mean – nor, I noticed, did she have to ask if he was serious. "And you?" Saroyan added to her inquisition calmly.

Booth, still unconcerned, said with a lilt, "Well, I do as I'm ordered." He had just enough amusement in his tone for it to just barely be a joke. Everyone knew Booth didn't follow commands. He was a fighter and a soldier, but he wasn't a drone, and his values would prioritize well above any supervisor's commands. I admired that – the same could be said about me, most of the time, but I felt less honorable given that the majority of my decisions, up until less than a year ago, had been primarily self-serving.

I could hear her knowing smile as the coroner disagreed. "No, you don't, Seeley." I made a face – they were using each other's first names again.

He sighed. "Okay, here we go…" he muttered, dropping the pretense of it _not_ being a severe possibility. There was tension in the team, and he didn't like to admit it, but it was looking more probable that it wasn't going to smooth over. "What's going on, Camille?"

"What if I fired her? What would you do?"

I bit my lip again, shutting my eyes to listen to their tones with all of my focus. She had stepped up from implications (looking for a replacement) to outright speaking about firing people. It was a small thing, but saying it out loud made me think it was more likely she was preparing to go through with it.

On the other hand, she was asking Booth. That gave me a bit of hope. I knew Booth would be on Brennan's side, even if not on mine, and if Saroyan was asking for a second opinion, then she hadn't made up her mind yet. Without certainty, she wouldn't do anything. She seemed too smart for that.

My father's voice became sterner. "We had something, Cam," he quietly stated, "But I'm with them." Careful not to be audible, I released the bite I held and let a slow, long sigh escape.

 _"_ _Them?"_ Saroyan questioned, probably with her eyebrows raised.

He answered without screwing around. "If you're pushed enough to fire Bones, you're pushed enough to fire Holly." I winced as my name came into it. I really wasn't sure I was comfortable with Booth defending me, personally, and aside from that, I also wasn't sure if Saroyan knew my relationship with him. I didn't _want_ her to know – and I wasn't going to ask, in case she didn't already. "They're my partners. I'm with them all the way, and don't doubt it for a second."

I caught footsteps behind me and turned around quickly. I'd been so focused on listening in that I had kept my eyes closed that I didn't hear or turn around until Hodgins was only about ten feet away from me, and I held my hand up to my mouth, crossing my lips with a finger emphatically.

The entomologist carried an evidence jar and a clipboard pressed between his chest and his upper arm. He cocked his head and came closer, eyes flicking to the open door to the autopsy bay.

"What're you doing?" He whispered conspiratorially, eyes glinting. He was almost always ready to play along, just for amusement, for friendship, for – for something happy.

"I left my phone in there," I answered without hesitation. It wasn't a lie, but Hodgins could tell from seeing me sneaking around that it wasn't the full truth, either. Despite me being _at least_ ten times better than him at lying, he could still look at context.

"You're eavesdropping," he corrected casually.

"Shamelessly," I confirmed, nodding.

He winked at me. "Got it." With a mischievous expression, Hodgins cleared his throat and went past me, walking into the bay without announcing himself first. I tried to picture what was happening inside, but couldn't see and didn't want to risk being seen, since I was supposed to be with Zach. Besides, that wink made me think he had a plan.

"Oh, look, it's bug boy," Booth jeered good-naturedly.

"Stuff it, G-man," Hodgins responded in kind. His tone became more respectful as he switched his attention to Saroyan. "Meet the English alba rose, climbing varietal. Nonexistent in the United States. Some say it was the 'rose by any other name' Shakespeare wrote about."

Booth and Saroyan abandoned their earlier line of conversation like it was nothing more serious than a talk about cars or sports. Clearly, they didn't intend for anyone to be taking it around like common gossip.

"And we give a rat's ass, because…?" Booth trailed off promptingly.

"It's what Dylan Crane was clutching in his cold, dead hand," Hodgins triumphantly replied, proud to have identified it.

Saroyan snorted softly. "So what? He was killed by Hamlet?"

I would bet a lot of French fries that Hodgins narrowed his eyes at her, affronted. He responded, "Wrong play," with a tone that suggested she really should've known better. "It's more likely he paid a visit to the rose wing of the United States Botanic Garden."

Saroyan didn't say anything in the first couple of seconds – I was feeling good for Hodgins, and I was a bit smug that it had been such a fast identification. And a specific one, too – maybe there was another lead to be found through visitor logs or security cameras at the gardens.

Booth didn't let Hodgins' satisfaction reign for very long. "Alright, you know, go get Holly, save her from the alien squint. I'm sure she'd like to get out of here for a while," he suggested in a way that wasn't really a suggestion. It was both exciting that he'd send me out to search for leads on my own and humorous that he was willing to go to that length to avoid having to go to a botanic garden.

"When it comes to bugs, slime, crud, and compost, you're the man," Saroyan accredited fairly.

Hodgins' laughter came after a second and then he exited the autopsy bay, one of his hands back down by his sides. He took a sharp left to see me and, once he was on my other side and well out of view, the hand that had been at his right side came up, holding my phone tucked halfway up the wide sleeve of his lab coat.

"Happy spying, Xena," he wished, giving it to me. I perked up, making a mental note that I should give the entomologist more credit. "If you're found out, I never saw you."

"You're just afraid of them," I accused in a whisper.

Hodgins shrugged, seeing no shame in admitting it. "Well, they have the guns and scalpels. Parking garage, fifteen?"

I nodded and quietly murmured back, "Bring evidence jars and a camera."

Hodgins left and I held my phone tightly. It did occur to me that I should go tell Zach I had to leave, but I was far too interested in seeing what happened now that Hodgins had left. I put the heel of my right foot up against the wall, opened up a message, and started typing out a quick text to Brennan asking about my earlier groceries question.

Inside the autopsy room, Booth sighed, dropped his volume, and picked up where he'd left off – just to conclude the entire discussion. "Look, Cam… maybe you just got off on the wrong foot with the two of them. In this case, especially, because – uh, they both have experience _as_ foster kids."

I nearly dropped my phone and turned my head to glare through the doorway, indignant, feeling a hot blush rise in my neck and face. _What right do you have to share that with her?!_ I knew it was his good intentions that led him to meddle, but this was like when he'd shared Brennan's personal information with that prosecutor to get a conviction. It was unfair, and it violated my privacy. I couldn't complain without revealing I had been hiding out and listening to a personal conversation, but if I was being honest with myself, I wasn't sure I could bring myself to complain about that, anyway. I knew I had nothing to be ashamed of – it wasn't _my_ fault I'd been in the foster system… I hadn't done anything wrong… yet being upset to have it shared would let him _know_ how much it bothered me that it was still part of my self-identity.

It took a good few seconds before she replied and when she did, it was with sympathy and the sudden understanding of someone who knew they'd screwed up pretty badly. "Oh, God… why didn't they ever tell me?"

"They don't like advertising it," Booth answered, with a hint that she definitely shouldn't make it into a big deal. "Oh, and, by the way, I didn't just tell you that."

 _Good, he knows it's not his place._ I prickled irately, but still struggled with how to address my own anger.

* * *

I had really thought that a field trip with Hodgins would be fun, but it turned out more entertaining in theory than in practice – at least, when going to a botanist's heaven, that was, and as one of his degrees was in botany, that was exactly what the U.S. Botanic Garden was to the bug and slime guy of the Jeffersonian. Although he let me drive his very nice car (but not rich-person-nice, because he did like to be a little inconspicuous), we liked different kinds of music, and his idea of car talk when Booth wasn't around to aggravate was a little different from mine.

Oh, well. It would have been a good time for a line about not being able to pick your family, at any rate, except I actually had chosen the team as my family, so there was that.

If Booth had been with us, then we would have gotten in as F.B.I. guests on official business, but as it was, all we had to show were our passes at the lab, which were useless here. Hodgins paid for the entry fee, too. Since it seemed like he paid for everything we did together, I was beginning to feel like I wasn't really pulling my weight here. Sometimes I wondered if having me on his insurance, paying for me to have a phone, and all the other nice things he did were part of wanting to treat me like his friend or if they were things he did because he didn't know what else to do with the money, if not to help people he cared about. He already paid all of Zach's bills, since they came to his properties and Zach's salary and social skills didn't really lend themselves to a nice apartment. Being a paid intern does add up, but it's nowhere near the money that even Booth or Angela make as full-time employees.

"United States Botanic Garden falls under the supervision of the Architect of the Capitol." Hodgins was spewing out everything he remembered from his memory or read about in the tourists' brochure he picked up while we were getting visitors' badges from the desk at the entrance. I liked to think I was good at pretending I cared, except I didn't care about pretending enough to pretend to care.

"Did you pick up a brochure for the map or for the lecture?" I asked, yawning and covering both mouth and nose. The flora was sorted and separated, but having so much of it at once made the gardens very pungent. It was like being in one of those perfume sections where every other bottle is a tester and they're all getting sprayed everywhere. It wasn't a very busy section of the garden that we were in, as Hodgins led us to the right wing right after getting a good look at the map. While he figured out where we were and where we needed to be, I'd picked out a cute snow globe for Parker and a postcard for Amy from the souvenir shop, and attached the lightweight bag to my jeans using a carabiner clip.

Hodgins gave me a calculating look before he decided that it was safe to fire whatever it was he wanted to say at me. "Well, I can annoy you all I like when there's not firearms around," the man cheekily offered in explanation.

"Did I ever mention I actually picked up an application for a gun permit?" I said unprompted, saying it in a very bright voice and then turning my head to look at his reaction. In less than two seconds, Hodgins went from looking like he'd won something to looking as though he was about to become a contestant on Fear Factor. It made me happily snicker under my breath at the reaction I elicited. Ever since shooting a psychotic senatorial employee, no one had ever been willing to let me live it down, even though I'd been armed without discharging said weapon several times since.

All pale and stunned, Hodgins lost all focus on the tri-folded and horizontally-folded brochure to throw his hands out in objection. "You're kidding." I looked over at him and shrugged my shoulders. _Am I?_ "You're not kidding," he breathed out slowly. "No way. You can't start carrying a weapon."

I knew Hodgins pretty well, I liked to think. While antsy about people carrying firearms, he got used to it once he's seen the person with it a few times and escaped unscathed. He barely noticed Booth's anymore. His first dislike for my idea stemmed more from anxiety than any lack of confidence in my capability. He's a very anxious person, which is surprising considering how laidback and fun his personality likes to be. The two don't seem like they should go together, but Hodgins manages to make them meet naturally. Since I knew that he was less appreciative of guns, I wasn't surprised about the way he'd said it, and I smiled rather than taking offense.

"The line of work is dangerous," I reasoned thoughtfully, holding up both hands and pointing at my stomach meaningfully. I had the proof in the form of scar tissue. Hodgins grimaced and didn't follow the line my fingers were pointing. It seemed completely crazy to me that someone was more bothered by my stabbing than I was, but I respected that he was more unsettled by the reminder and dropped my hands. "I'd like to be taken more seriously," I added, smoothly pushing on and moving past the first point. "And it'll bother Booth." That made him smile and I smiled back. All better. It would be nice to prove to Booth that I can handle a deadly weapon on a regular basis without blasting another hole in myself or anyone else that didn't seriously deserve it. My hands slithered their way a few inches down from my belt line to my pockets. "Which way to the Romeo and Juliet roses?"

Hodgins lifted an arm and pointed to our right a few yards further down. A little detour from the path had a depression down in the ground and flora arranged around it. The tops of the flowers offered the colors and they all glowed, some of them spotted with darker color from where they were hit with mist from a tiny lawn waterfall a few feet away. A bridge crossed over the lowest part of the dip and while one side connected directly to the path, the other looped around behind the bridge and slowly curved back into the paved walkway. It was good that he knew where we were going, but what really made me want to smack him was what he very nonchalantly said.

"It's over there, where Kelly Morris is standing."

A blonde-haired teen in tight-fitted jeans and a grey drawstring hoodie stood on the center of the bridge and by the edge, looking over the railing down into the roses that had inspired Shakespeare. She fit Kelly Morris's description perfectly, and the relaxation in her posture suggested she'd been there for a while. I stopped walking promptly and crossed my arms, staring at Hodgins expectantly.

His face fell as he realized the problem, too. "Oh," he said, faltering and looking meek. I shook my head while I uncrossed my arms and motioned for him to come.

"Great observation," I sarcastically applauded, keeping my voice lower so it didn't alert her. "You couldn't have pointed that out when you saw her?" The entomologist looked kind of guilty and shrugged his shoulders helplessly. "Go distract her." I indicated the direct path to her and changed course for the side of the bridge that looped around. "I'm going to go around to the other side."

"Why me?" He whispered back, looking between Kelly and I like he wasn't sure which of us was going to be less pleasant to deal with after that slip of his absent mind.

"You're an adult and she'll probably go away from you, not towards you, sending her towards me." I gestured to each of us respectively as I talked. For several reasons, it was better if Kelly came to me; not the least of which being that I was the same sex and closer to her age, which meant that being approached by me would be a lot less creepy than being approached by Hodgins, so I was less intimidating. Hopefully.

"You're the expert on hormonal teenagers," he decided, shrugging his shoulders like he was deciding "this is it" and going all in with it. He went off towards the bridge and I snapped my eyes around to glare at him. _You're going to regret saying that, Hodgins!_ Then I just huffed and went the long way around to come to Kelly's other side and stop her from running away.

The entomologist wandered up to her, but had the good sense to leave a few feet between them, and he stayed to one side of the bridge rather than taking up the center. Hodgins doesn't look particularly frightening. If I were where Kelly was, I wouldn't particularly care where he was or how he postured himself, but that was because I knew him. To a stranger, he was a man almost in his thirties with a slightly scruffy look who shouldn't be hovering around lonesome teenage girls. "Hey," he said, and that was what made her look up and actually notice that he was there. She predictably turned her body towards him defensively and moved her left foot behind her right to spin around and run. "The United States Botanic Garden falls under the supervision of the, uh, Architect of the Capitol."

I sighed and looked up towards the clouds in the sky, squinting against sunlight. _Way to go._ Clearly he didn't have as much sense when it came to what was creepy to say.

Kelly backed up. "Get away from me, perv," she accused with a snarl.

"Kelly Morris," I said softly, doing the opposite of Hodgins and walking up the center of the bridge behind her. She half turned to face me, straightened straw-blonde hair swinging and catching on her hoodie while she tried to decide who to be more wary of. She pressed her back against the railing behind her. "We're law enforcement, not perverts." I shot Hodgins a look. Maybe he should remember that next time and say something a little less strange. I asked him to give her a distraction, not a history lesson.

She sized me up and then started to bolt in Hodgins' direction. He moved to the side quickly but kept his hands up over his head, not moving his arms to touch her, just blocking her way. She stopped, skidded, and stumbled backwards to avoid getting too close to him.

"It's okay," he assured her softly, his voice calm and empathetic. "We're just here to help." I blinked and looked away from Hodgins, concentrating on Kelly. That was a prime example of one of the reasons I liked him so well. In spite of being insulted, he was still trying to be as least aggressive as possible, and I thought it was really awesome that he could sound so caring about someone he'd never met before.

"I promise we don't want to hurt you." Taking a page from Hodgins' book for once, I lifted my hands to shoulder-height with my fists open, showing that I wasn't holding anything. "Just to ask about Dylan."

Kelly's lower lip trembled before she caught the reaction and stopped it by grinding her teeth. "Dylan's dead," she stated sharply, glaring angrily at Hodgins before she looked back at me.

I nodded slowly. At least she wouldn't be too surprised. I hated telling people when their loved ones died. It was one of the worst parts about the job. "Did you see his death?" I inquired, slowly lowering my hands while I made small steps and slow progress closer to her on the bridge.

The girl scoffed. I noticed when she tossed her head and flipped her hair back out of her face that her ears had three piercings – two in the lobe and one upper helix. "Who do you think killed him?" She asked, fighting to keep herself from frowning and not coming close to succeeding. She glowered in rebellion but didn't try to run away again. I looked at Hodgins over her shoulder; the man looked startled by the question and then redirected his eyes to her back as if asking me what we were supposed to do now.

* * *

"Why did you kill your boyfriend?" I asked disappointedly. If Kelly was the killer, then Saroyan's bias was confirmed and I felt pretty dumb for fighting it so vehemently. I sat across from her and leaned back in the chair, looking right at Kelly and trying to catch the blonde's eyes. Her lawyer, appointed by social services, was a tall Jamaican woman named Diane, but, as per usual when I handled suspects, I pretended the lawyer wasn't there.

Kelly had seemed like she wanted to be tough and badass, but once she'd been left to stew in the interrogation room for a while, her jitters started to show. She could barely keep her legs still, and the black lipstick she'd been wearing when she'd been brought in had been mostly sucked off by now. She and I were about the same size – I was perhaps a little thinner, though it was hard to judge with her wearing a hoodie – and if she'd had dark hair, we could've passed as sisters with few problems.

Diane sighed, even as Kelly bit her bottom lip. Her hands had been in her lap since I'd come in, pushed along by Booth, who insisted I'd have an easier time building a rapport – and she probably wasn't wrong.

"Miss Kirkland-"

With little patience already, I refused to take my eyes off of the other seventeen-year-old. "She implied she was involved with the murder already."

" _Actually,_ I believe she asked, 'who do you think killed him?'" The lawyer corrected me, her legs and arms crossed. She wasn't enjoying herself, but she wasn't intimidated or upset either, and really, she seemed to know what she was doing. "It's an ambiguous question."

Still, giving lawyers credit where it's due, their job is in direct contrast to mine most of the time – they want their clients to be protected, but I want them to talk so that I can pursue investigations. Although I see the importance of their jobs and the hard work they have to commit to their careers, their roles in my life are mostly as annoyances.

" _And_ an implication," I shot back calmly.

Through this short debate on semantics, Kelly's soft blue eyes darted between myself and her advocate. She brought a hand up to play with the plastic tan cross on her black necklace and interjected. "Oh, I killed him," she assured. Diane sent scolding, frustrated eyes in her direction while Kelly just looked right at me again, nodding fervently. "I did it."

 _Okay, I'm not even the lawyer, and I still want to slam my head on the table._

She was intentionally _helping_ me? What? "You what now?" I eyed her suspiciously. _This is not how it's supposed to go…_ Cooperation was great, but outright self-incrimination?

"Because he broke a promise to me," Kelly added, seeming as if she was trying doubly hard to convince me.

"The promise to… stay with you?" I guessed, going off of what I knew of them. Kelly, a foster child who might've been about to lose her home, possibly her brother, after losing the rest of her life only a few years before, and Dylan, a lovesick idiot with long goals. They were both ambitious, and I wasn't sure that ambition wouldn't have become self-destructive in the long-term, but for the time, it seemed like it had driven Kelly to straighten up and Dylan to keep his promises.

As soon as I suggested a reason, Kelly latched onto it and nodded again, her earrings swaying. "He tossed me a couple hundred bucks and told me he was going to college," she explained. "That we couldn't see each other anymore."

I kept looking at her eyes intently. She was making eye contact, but she didn't seem to have any shame for what she'd done… and not to mention that she didn't seem very upset about being callously broken up with. Her voice wasn't angry _or_ guilty, and I wasn't sure what to make of that.

"How did you react to that?" I tried again, working to get her to talk from an angle that I understood.

Kelly shrugged carelessly. "I pushed him out a window," she offered. "It was kind of an accident, right? What do you call it? A crime of passion?" She was a little sardonic as she spoke, but wasn't mocking.

I bit the inside of my cheek and held back a sigh. Brennan kept insisting, over and over, that the fall had been what killed Dylan – and she was right. But for the murderer not to include that they'd assaulted him first? It seemed odd. Usually when we had people confess, they told the whole story because they felt that the context would either make their actions more understandable or they wanted to get a deal through cooperating.

"You were so mad at him that you gave him a push out of a window?" I summarized skeptically.

Kelly swiftly nodded, even before I was done speaking. "Yes," she clearly confirmed.

"While he was _conscious?"_ I questioned, as Diane looked at Kelly like she was doing something incredibly stupid. Maybe she was, but I was beginning to think that the reason things didn't add up was because I was being lied to.

She hesitated, just a second, but then agreed. "Yeah." A flash of something went through her eyes, pained and upset, but it wasn't anger or bitterness. "He screamed, okay?" She added as if to satisfy me.

"And you _didn't_ attack him with anything else, you just gave him a shove?" I clarified, heart lifting a little optimistically.

"He was close to the window," Kelly replied, shaking her head and making a gesture with her hands like pushing something – or someone – away from her. "It was an opportunistic thing. Then I ran away."

While I was glad that I was right, and Saroyan was therefore wrong, I was a little more concerned with why she was trying so hard to make me believe she had murdered her own boyfriend. I decided to end the act right there, knowing I'd already proven she was just following my lead.

"No, you didn't," I denied. "And I know that because we have evidence he was struck by a rusting pipe." Kelly shut her mouth quickly and her eyes widened a little. She swallowed hard nervously and looked to her lawyer for help before remembering that the lawyer wasn't on the same page. I continued, appealing to her gently that she wasn't guilty and shouldn't worry about being in trouble. "You went down to the alleyway and you wrapped him up in a shroud of linen, and then you pressed the Romeo and Juliet rose into his hand to say goodbye. Which seems like a strange thing to do immediately after killing someone in a rage."

Sourly, she retorted, "Well, I'm pretty screwed up. Didn't you hear?" She added self-deprecatingly.

I rolled my eyes. Being a brat wasn't going to get her out of this. Of all the things I had thought might happen while I interrogated a suspect, being exasperated because someone was desperately trying to get themselves convicted for a murder they didn't actually commit was really damn low on the list, and yet there we were.

"Do you know the sandwich guy, Kevin Duncan?" I asked, not really caring anymore. It was still being investigated, though, so I had to ask, just to cover all of the bases. I was sure that if she hadn't killed Dylan, she sure as hell hadn't killed Kevin. Besides that, Kelly was just too anxious to shoot a person like that and then manage to hide from police. "He died last night. We think that the deaths were likely connected somehow."

Kelly sighed, and – to my irritation and very slight amusement – tacked that onto her confession, as well. "Fine, yeah, I killed him, too." She was far less concerned with making that buyable, I noted.

"Okay, you killed him, too," I reiterated sarcastically.

"Okay, I'd prefer we _not_ pursue this line of questioning." Diane cut in, reaching a hand across to Kelly's knee. The blonde startled and jerked her leg out of the woman's grasp, turning her body away from the lawyer.

"Me, too," I agreed – to Diane's visceral surprise. I wasn't interested in questioning someone I already knew was innocent, especially not when she was trying to dig her own grave. "Kelly, whoever you're protecting – whatever you're trying to stay safe from, you can tell me." I knew it seemed trite, maybe even predictable, but I had to give it a shot. _Offer safety, understanding, and compassion from the investigator who had brought her in to the feds. Right, that'll work._ Kelly looked right at me and seemed to longingly consider it, but she was simultaneously unsure and skittish.

Ultimately, her fears won out, and whatever she thought was important enough to lie for was kept silent in her head. She looked down into her lap, resolutely speechless, and let her straightened hair hang down like protective curtains around her face.

* * *

"Well, she confessed," Booth said, drinking his coffee between the sentence and the soft, disappointed sigh. In truth, there wasn't that much that we could do to get Kelly out of the bad place she'd put herself in – even with no evidence strictly tying her to Kevin's murder, there _was_ evidence that could be interpreted as incriminating in regards to Dylan's death, and it was only a small jump for the prosecution from one to the other.

"She followed my lead, even when I inaccurately told her what happened." I paused for that to sink in. It was unfair! That was the proof that Kelly hadn't killed Dylan. If she was going to confess to murder anyway, why lie about how it was done? "She _lied,"_ I stressed.

Booth sighed again and sorrowfully looked out the diner's window at the pedestrians across the street, oblivious to the arrest of an innocent girl and the murder of an optimistic boy. "You know, I'm just trying to think of a situation so bad where a girl would confess to a murder to try and get out of it." When he brought that part of the situation to light, it made my stomach twist. I couldn't think of many reasons to lie – maybe to protect myself from harm? But it was easy to get hurt in prison, too, and I'd rather tell the police who I was afraid of than put myself at risk in a way that would harm my record.

So what _was_ Kelly doing, trying to get herself convicted of first-degree homicide when she clearly wasn't responsible? Girls like us, girls in the foster system, and especially at our age, we don't _dare_ do something to hurt ourselves without a damn good reason. So close to being set free of the system, we need all the good will we can get, and we won't get that by having a rap sheet, so we stop caring if we're a little bit selfish. The only people we can count on is family, and sometimes even that's not true – and even when it is, our foster families will never quite feel like our real families once we've been through a few different homes.

 _So_ _what was it?_ Did she feel guilty? Did she know who did it, and loathe herself so much for not stopping it that she wanted to take the punishment? Or was whoever responsible for it threatening her somehow, scaring her into thinking that even time in prison would be safer than the streets? She infuriated and puzzled me at the same time and I was desperate to know why. What was her deal? If I were in her place, would I be doing the same thing – lying to the police, not to protect myself, but to get charged with a serious felony?

I was glad I hadn't ordered any food, because I felt like eating would just make me more inclined to throw up. Sighing, I pushed my drink away from the edge of the table near me and turned my head to look at the floor over the edge of the booth. Brennan's eyes turned to me in concern but she didn't ask, probably already knowing exactly what I was thinking. Booth could be as empathetic as he liked to compete with the anthropologist's inaptitude, but he would never be able to relate to me on such a level as Brennan.

The little silver bell over the diner's front doors rattled, chiming and chirping. Fran came into the restaurant, a brown canvas bag over her shoulder with vertical straps on the front like an old army satchel. Her head was down and her hands were around the shoulder strap coming diagonally across her front, and she came to us straight away.

"Agent Booth, Dr. Brennan." Fran said formally, her face pinched and lips turned in a frown. She didn't look at me, though I tipped my head back to watch her curiously.

"Mrs. Duncan," Brennan returned in the same polite respect, sounding more curious than surprised to see her.

Booth indicated the seat next to him, scooted in to the window with the space to the aisle left open. "You want to sit down?" He invited kindly, probably still feeling a little bit guilty about putting a gun on her when she had been honestly trying to help teenagers who didn't have a place to get the things that they _should_ have access to. The condoms may be one thing, but it's ridiculous for people not to have medicine when they're sick, or food when they're hungry. "Have a cup of coffee?"

She shook her head. "No, thank you."

"I'm sorry about your husband, Fran," I apologized, trying to sound consoling without letting her hear that I wasn't too shaken up now that I'd gotten over the part where I had seen and talked to him. At least he had never approached me – I had come to them in curiosity. It felt rude not to mourn for the death of someone I'd known, but it was hard to be sorry when I thought of the girls' likely legitimate claims of sexual harassment and assault.

Fran nodded slightly at me with a tight smile in thanks and I looked back down at the ice cubes in my glass of water. "Did Kelly Morris kill Dylan?" She asked tersely.

"Well," Booth said slowly, sharing a silent look with Brennan across the table. "She confessed." That was about as clear as he could be without starting to give out more sensitive details of the investigation.

"And now you think she killed my husband as well?" Fran double-checked, voice controlled well.

"It's very possible," Brennan reluctantly answered to the best of her ability. I looked back up to see how Fran was feeling. I wasn't getting enough satisfactory input from just listening to her tone anymore. "I'd believe that before I believed she killed Dylan."

Fran took in a deep breath. "Kelly shouldn't take the blame," she said firmly, pulling up the unfastened straps of her bag and dipping her hand in to the wrist. Slowly, she took her hand out, grasping something large. The handle of the gun was the first to come out. Booth leaned back in shock but didn't immediately go for his sidearm. "You'll find one bullet missing," she said, finally trembling a little as she set the firearm down on the edge of our table.

Booth's eyes went wide but he reigned in his reaction quickly to be the impartial agent. "You're confessing to your husband's murder?" He clarified for the sake of a very clear arrest. Cooperatively, Fran moved slightly towards my side to give Booth more room to slide out of the seat and unlock his handcuffs from his belt.

"He used me to get close to young girls," she said wryly. Fran's eyes looked blank, almost frighteningly so, like she was forcing herself not to feel because she didn't want to deal with the onslaught that would come if emotions were permitted. "I don't know how many through the years."

 _When did she find out?_ I thought in my head. Had this been a long time coming, or had it been a fast reveal and even faster decision made as a result of us having to dig up her husband's history? It didn't seem pertinent to ask, and it would probably come out in her questioning and statement, anyway.

She docilely moved her arms behind her back, and, courteously, Booth wasn't very rough when he put the handcuffs on. He made them tight, like he had to, but there wasn't any aggressive arm-jerking or wrist-pulling. "Frances Duncan, you're under arrest," he said lowly, trying to avoid creating a big scene in the middle of a popular and favored eatery. A few people were watching, and one of the blonde waitresses who frequently served us and knew our jobs had caught on, and she was talking animatedly to a child at the bartop to distract the little one from turning around and seeing. The mother looked infinitely grateful. "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

Brennan looked to the woman and saw the dullness in her eyes, the unnerving lack of internal life. "Thank you," she said, pained by what would happen next but relieved that she was doing the right thing and saving Kelly from taking the heat for yet another homicide. Fran just swallowed something she wanted to say back and nodded slightly to Brennan, avoiding my eyes.

 _Is she scared I was one of her husband's victims, too?_ She'd have known if I was – everyone would have, because I'd have made one _hell_ of a fuss and been out for blood, but she didn't know me well enough to know that.

"You have the right to an attorney." Booth started leading her towards the door with a hand on one of her wrists to ensure she didn't duck out anywhere. His voice got quieter as he got further away, half of his coffee left to chill. "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you."

I stared at the silver barrel of the gun, lying pointed in my direction but dormant and unthreatening. I was fairly sure it was loaded so that it would be obvious that a bullet had been fired, but it was not prepared to be fired and the safety mechanism was still flipped on.

I didn't want to touch that gun. Kelly might be off the hook, but that makes two old acquaintances less than I thought they'd been. One a molester and pervert, possibly a rapist, and the other a murderer – not a cold-blooded killer, but a murderer nonetheless, and you can't really come back from something like that, can you?

"You have some gloves in your bag?" I asked Brennan, hoping that she would understand the silent plea not to make me handle or catalogue that evidence.

* * *

It didn't take long for Saroyan to match not just the bullet wound, but the residue from the gun's barrel to the same stuff on the corpse. "Ballistics confirms that the bullet that killed Kevin Duncan came from Fran Duncan's gun." She crossed her arms as she announced the results to our team (sans Booth) with a sort of finality.

Zach seemed a little surprised it was that easy. "Case closed."

"Only on Kevin Duncan's death," I countered. Fran had murdered her husband – which still shocked me a little to think about – but hadn't had anything to do with Dylan's demise.

Saroyan turned her eyes to me, exasperated. "But since Kelly Morris confessed-"

"She didn't do it," I interrupted flatly, crossing my arms and standing defiantly. I wasn't going to back down when we were arguing over who we wanted Booth to arrest. Kelly was innocent, and I wasn't going to let Saroyan's privileged and prejudiced opinions be the reason she was punished for something she didn't do.

The pathologist narrowed her eyes. "What evidence do you have?" She drummed the fingers of one hand against her upper arm.

"She confessed to a _lie_ that I told her," I explained again, angry. How could she actually think that Kelly had killed someone she had no reason to kill when the girl herself didn't have a clue what did or didn't actually happen? "She doesn't know the full story because she didn't do it!"

Hodgins nodded along with me in full agreement, risking Saroyan's ire, and turned around his clipboard, flipping up a page. "How about this?" He asked, holding the top sheets back and turning it around. It showed a floor plan for the warehouse with different sections squared off. "Specimen two sixty-eight, from this upper right corner on the schematic." He tapped the edge of the plans. "It's a match to the trauma to the skull, _and_ it has the right makeup of rust particulates."

I smirked and let my guard down a little. Hodgins had found what we were reasonably certain was the weapon used on the teenager, yet Kelly hadn't even thought to mention it on her own.

"You _are_ good," Angela noted admiringly, although it was unclear if she meant that he'd found the murder weapon or that he'd intervened before another dispute like before started.

Hodgins smiled back at her. "Oh, you have no idea," he promised, flirting. I raised my eyebrows and looked away, no longer as interested in being their audience. Angela kept smiling at him and he seemed proud.

It was really cute until Zach said loudly, "Are you having a moment?" His voice, suspicious and confused, broke up the bonding moment that even Saroyan and Brennan had allowed.

I sighed and gave Zach a very pointed look and scolded, "They _were,_ until you interrupted."

Brennan shifted and drew everyone back to our largest issue – how Kelly fit into our investigation. "How does finding the pipe prove that Kelly Morris is lying?" She asked, looking for some substantial reason why she was no longer a suspect. I wasn't sure we could offer forensic proof without having an alternative suspect to compare the odds to, but pure logic should be enough to bring her over onto my side.

"How does her confession not include the kid getting his head bashed with a rusty pipe?" Hodgins answered incredulously.

Saroyan had been quiet for a moment, looking pensive and thoughtful. Before Brennan could defend herself from Hodgins' tone, the pathologist looked over at Angela and spoke up. "Can you run the scenario through your magic, holographic, crystal ball thingy?" She asked, making a vague motion with one hand that I guess was supposed to represent the Angelatron.

Angela was shaking her head before she had even finished. "Too many variables," she explained shortly. The boss looked disappointed and a little frustrated that the technology wasn't reliable this time. Angela, on the other hand, perked up like she'd gotten her own inspiration from the question. "But I have another idea." She grinned and looked between me and Hodgins.

When someone looked between Hodgins and I, they usually wanted us to do something overdramatic – like an experiment – or silly – like my earlier, revised performance of _Romeo and Juliet._ Angela was not usually the one to suggest experiments, and I wasn't sure what one would solve anyway. Drama it was.

"Reenactment?" I guessed, looking up with interest.

* * *

 **A/N**

 **Me Last Time: "Oh I'm getting more invested, I'm recovering my muse, I'm gonna write more..."**

 **Me, Six Months Later, Finally Updating: "Hello friends, this is awkward..."**

 **I have had a lot going on this year and I'm admittedly trash at organizing and keeping up with my life, haha :') Anyway, I'm very flattered by all the positive reviews and everyone's excitement! Some of you have thought further into the future of this story than even I have. I do plan on continuing it, and my goal is still to at least get it through the canonical fifth season.**

 **Thank you so much for the continued support and feedback! That really helps motivate me to keep going, even when I start questioning my projects.**


	16. The Boy in the Shroud, Part Five

After Angela instructed Hodgins and me to move the examination table to the edge of the platform, its long edge against the railing, it seemed like the exam platform had doubled in size. It was better to have a bigger stage – it meant we could actually act out things without holding back, because if size constraints made us move in a specific way, it could hinder the results.

"Okay, firstly, everyone come back over here." Angela was kind of bossy, but liberal arts – which this kind of was, maybe, if we counted it as a form of theater – was her domain. Hodgins joined Zach, leaning against a rail on another side, and I went to the corner where I turned my back out to the mostly-empty lab space. Booth was the only one who didn't press himself to an edge. "Booth, you're Dylan Crane."

Booth scoffed. "You know what?" He threw his arm up incredulously, disdainfully shaking his head. "I'm out the door."

"Oh, no you don't," I rebuked, crossing my arms. "Come on, be the suburban knight." Our methods were odd, but they worked, and we surely didn't need him being discouraging and unhappy.

Booth sighed but put his hands in his pockets and redirected his feet to take him to the center of the platform, where he turned around to look at us. Angela pointed a teal-manicured finger at me. "Alright, teenager. You're Kelly Morris."

"I feel stupid," Booth complained.

I rolled up the sleeves of my hoodie while leaving those of my undershirt down. "I'm about to fake kill you, how do you think I feel?" I reached behind me to tie my hair back, sweeping it up quickly into a messy ponytail.

"Okay, you two." Angela smiled and clasped her hands. "You are young, you are in love, you're about to break up-"

Zach and Brennan were the only ones not looking at her like she'd lost her mind. I interrupted. "This is feeling incestuous," I stated with awkward alarm. Angela stopped, glanced at Booth, and cringed when she realized what she'd done. "Less with the lovey-dovey pep talk, please."

Angela stepped back next to Brennan regretfully, still looking a little bothered. If I weren't one of the people involved, I would've laughed.

"Kelly Morris says she argued with Dylan and pushed him out the window." Brennan looked down at the transcript from the interrogation and then gave me a "shoo" motion with her hand to commence.

Touching used to scare me, but now, when it was on my terms, it wasn't nearly as bad as it used to be. After realizing the progress I'd unknowingly made, I had made a silent promise to myself to try to improve more. Seeing my friends interact had made me realize that I wanted to be able to feel comfortable touching my friends, not antsy and fidgety, and the only real way to improve on that was to acclimate.

I reached for Booth and gave him a light shove in the center of his back. He pretended that I had pushed him harder than I actually had, overdramatically stumbling forward.

"She pushed him, and then tried to save him by grabbing his arm?" Saroyan asked skeptically, arching an eyebrow with her arms crossed.

Booth, on second thought, kept his feet where he was but held his right arm out further behind him. I grabbed at his wrist without letting myself think twice.

"That explains why my nail polish was in the scratches on his arm," I noted, looking down. My nails were kept short, but Angela had convinced me to let them be painted when she took me to the mall for what she deemed "staple female things". I'd chosen a simple French manicure. My fingernails weren't even touching Booth's skin, but if I had grabbed harder or pulled, then I could've scratched him. "But that doesn't account for the pipe."

Angela tipped her head while she watched and raised one arm to mimic an overhanded motion. "Kelly would've had to strike him with the pipe from behind, and then drive him through the glass."

I fisted my left hand as if I were holding something, but Booth pulled his right arm away from me and turned back around before I had the chance to act anything out. "But she said they were arguing face to face," he countered. "He would have seen her coming."

"And a blow from the front is inconsistent with the force profile," Brennan added. "That means there had to be a third person. Someone who snuck up behind him."

"Guys, I need a Kevin Duncan." Although she hadn't addressed anyone in particular, when Angela said this, she looked at Hodgins and Zach. She knew there was no way Brennan or Saroyan would want to play along.

Hodgins sighed. I noticed that he caved in pretty quickly when Angela asked for something. "I'll do it," he volunteered grimly, rolling his shoulders back to take off his lab coat. "Kelly already called me a perv, so I have my motivation," he grumbled, shoving his blue coat at Zach. He came forward to join Booth and I in the middle of the platform.

Booth turned so he was facing me. I looked up at him and met his eyes awkwardly, unsure what I was supposed to do. I knew he wasn't enjoying the activity, and truthfully, I wasn't much, either. This entire case was sapping my energy.

Hodgins came up behind Booth and pretended to brandish a weapon. The amusement must've shown in my eyes because Booth guessed what I was looking at over my shoulder. "Careful, bug brain," he cautioned, glaring off to the side.

 _Well, if he didn't want to really hit you before, he might now._

"Kevin strikes Dylan with the pipe," Brennan narrated. Hodgins brought his arm forward and made a verbal sound effect when he reached the crux of his swing. "Which moves him forward." On Brennan's cue, the FBI agent twisted a little in turn with being hit and stumbled towards me. I sidestepped impulsively to avoid being walked into and quickly decided that that was a universal impulse, not just one of my quirks.

"Kelly grabs the pipe away from him," Angela urged, "But Dylan is losing consciousness."

"If he was passing out, he didn't have to throw Dylan out the window. He could've simply pushed him," Brennan suggested, looking across at the artist.

To act it out, I reached towards Hodgins. He uncurled his fist when I took away the pretend pipe. Then the entomologist reached out and really _did_ shove Booth's back, pushing him towards where I'd been standing.

Booth took a larger step to compensate and quickly spun around, raising a finger to scold. "Easy!"

"Kelly still has to grab his arm," Saroyan pointed out. "Because of the nail polish and the scratches."

I opened my right hand, dropping the pretend pipe, and took the agent's offered wrist again. "But that was to save him," Brennan emphasized, sending a meaningful look over at the pathologist, who raised her chin in acknowledgment.

"Which would put polish _and_ rust in the wound," Hodgins excitedly stated, pointing to my hand and then at the ground where I'd pretended to drop a pipe. Like Kelly, I was right-handed, so I had unthinkingly performed all of those actions with the same hand.

"But she can't hold him, and he falls." Brennan concluded, tone going down disappointedly.

I released my gentle hold on his wrist again, and Booth exaggerated stumbling backwards. "Whoa," he complained, straightening up as he deemed that he'd sufficiently feigned falling out a window.

"That was a little overdramatic," I informed.

Saroyan glanced over to Brennan. "That theory explains the physical evidence," she admitted, raising a hand as if to ask what else we needed to establish.

"But not why Kelly would confess to a murder to protect Kevin Duncan." Brennan's lips were thinned and displeased.

I answered for her, shaking my head. "No way she would," I asserted firmly. "I met her, there's no way she'd try to protect someone like that." Kelly had a vibe that reminded me of myself – she wasn't going to take the fall for just anyone, much less a creep who more or less had it coming.

"She might if she were afraid of him," Angela suggested helpfully, reminding me of one of the first cases I'd worked, where a teenager had kept his mouth shut because he was too scared of his abusive, pedophilic father to speak up.

"But she knows he's dead," Brennan reminded to shoot down that theory.

Booth had been uncharacteristically quiet. I sent him another look and saw him in the process of lifting a hand for them to wait. "Guys," he called, a dawning look of realization on his face. It wasn't a nice transition as he went from understanding to upset. All of the Medico-Legal team looked in his direction. "There's only two people in this world that Kelly Morris would cover for… one of them went out that window."

 _Her loved ones._ Like me, she'd protect the people she cared about. I didn't have a significant other; I had a team. And outside of my team (which includes Booth), the number of people is limited significantly to Amy and… Parker.

"She would protect her brother," I sighed. "Even if it meant facing prison." I wasn't sure I'd cover for Parker if he grew up to hurt someone, accident or not – responsibility and accountability are important to me. But Parker also had other people looking out for him, and he wasn't the only one left for me to worry about. In those respects, Kelly and I were markedly different. My phone started to ring. It was a generic tone, but I'd set it to one that no one else in the lab had, and the chiming notes sounded from my pocket. "Kirkland," I answered, bringing it to my ear and pacing out of the center of the platform, moving towards the end further from the team for a measure of privacy.

 _"_ _Miss Kirkland,"_ a man's voice stated. He sounded a little nasally and his voice was raw. I wasn't sure who was talking but opted not to get too alarmed – I _had_ just said my name, after all.

"Er, yeah." I put an arm on the railing and leaned against it. "Hello?" I prompted impatiently after a few seconds of radio silence.

Apparently, my privacy is worthless, because everyone on the team had just stopped what they were doing to listen in. I did a double-take and waved at them dismissively to get back to it, even when Hodgins stepped forward and curiously asked who it was.

I couldn't hear anything remarkable in the phone's background, just maybe some metallic rattling. When the speaker talked again, their voice was more in control. It sounded tenser, but it sounded less throaty. _"This is Deputy Director Cullen."_

 _Oh, sure, of course._ I started to roll my eyes before I realized why I hadn't recognized his voice right away – congestion, crying. Annoyance turned to anxiety. There was only one reason he might cry and call me at the same time. I had never really believed that pain ever manifested itself as an actual heart ache, but something settled deep in my chest with weight that made it harder to breathe.

 _No. Please, no._

"Why do you have my phone number?" I asked numbly.

A sigh came, then yet another breath that accompanied a firmer resolve. _"I took it from Amy's cell,"_ he answered, in a way confirming what I had already expected.

He wouldn't have needed to take it from her phone if she were able to tell him herself.

I'd known from the first day I met Amy that she was going to die. Her terminal diagnosis of advanced lung cancer had been hanging over her head for months. Once a doctor unknowingly gave her a tainted bone graft, it likely only took weeks for a full metastasis to her lungs, and she'd had a ticking time bomb in her own body.

The line wasn't silent. Phone lines rarely are. But neither of us were saying anything, and I didn't know what I was _supposed_ to say, because my friend was dead and I had been planning on visiting her but now I can't because she's dead. I stared at the silver safety rail without seeing it.

 _"_ _Amy – ah, she's – she's passed."_ He confirmed it anyway and I shut my eyes when I felt my face getting hot. _"Just today."_ It would've had to be today, I thought; I'd been texting her in the morning. _"In the hospital."_

My fingers wound around the rail and I squeezed until my knuckles turned white. Swallowed hard. Blinked, and closed my eyes. "… I understand, sir." It was hard not to let my voice fade, but somehow I managed, between the soreness in my hand and the gradually increasing ache in my face of screwing my eyes shut.

A pair of footsteps moved closer to me. I snapped my eyes open again and turned around so my back was to the rail, held up a hand to stop. "Kid?" Booth asked lowly, courteous of the phone call but worried, concern written in the lines on his forehead and the way his brow pinched.

I waved them off again, not dismissive this time but commanding. The silence from them just let the empty, dull ache fill up. That thing that had put itself in my chest felt like it was expanding, and the more solemnity it received, the faster it filled up. I felt I'd have had an easier time staying grounded if there had been noise around me. Just normal, careless noise.

"Is there something from me you want, sir?" I asked, forcing my manners to account for that I felt that the _meaningful_ things I could've said had been forgotten. "I can leave immediately." _I owe it to Amy,_ I guiltily thought, then wondered why I was guilty when I wasn't the one who'd killed her.

"Um, we're working," Saroyan interrupted me. She had her eyebrows raised, her hip out authoritatively, and she looked, more than anything, _irked_ that I was making plans without her permission. I shot a venomous, incredulous glower at her. "That's for me to address-"

Before I had to say something I'd regret, Booth moved away from me after surveying my face. "Cam," he discouraged, and the single utterance of her name, in that tone, convinced the pathologist to not finish her thought.

I devoted all of my focus back to the phone call, right as Amy's dad started to talk to me again. _"Can you – ah – come by the hospital?"_ He was punctuated by movement of the phone, then what sounded like a distant sniffle and a few seconds of quiet. Then the phone moved again and was back to his face now that he'd wiped his face or something. _"Amy had some things she wanted you to have. Wrote your name on some paper. We can, uh, discuss the rest in person."_

"Got it," I said, equally numb as I'd been before. Since Saroyan shut up, the switch on my feelings felt like it had been turned off. I knew it hurt, I knew it was hard to breathe. I knew that I didn't want to talk. But just as suddenly as I'd struggled to process, I understood, just like I'd said. Amy was gone. Dead. The slow, slow murder had finally been completed.

Cullen was the first to hang up. I didn't even make sure the call was off, just lowered my phone-holding hand from my face with the feeling that it was going to hit me again without warning and I'd go back to feeling like I needed to keep my eyes closed or I'd cry, feeling like I had done something wrong for living my life while my friend died in the hospital the day I was supposed to visit again. My grip was so loose, I'm surprised my phone didn't fall.

Hodgins cleared his throat. "Who was that?" He asked, a little nervous and looking over at Angela. It didn't take a genius to see that something had happened, something was wrong, because my lack of a visceral reaction was, itself, an uncharacteristic reaction.

"I have to go," I announced, looking down at my phone bleakly before remembering it wasn't going to take me there. I put it in my pocket and set off to leave, striding with purpose, and like hell was anyone going to stop me.

Booth tried, just a little bit. "Wait, Holly," he started to implore. He made a step in my direction and started to reach a hand for me before he hesitated and brought it back down. "What's wrong?"

"Don't –" I shook my head, felt the pull of my ponytail, reached up and let it down. "I'm sorry," I apologized without any meaning to the words. I wasn't sure I had anything to apologize for at the moment, and it just came out as an excuse to leave. "I just have to-" _To go, get away from here, to pick up what she gave me and honor what she wanted._ It was the last thing that could be done for her. It would be pretty bitchy of me not to do it, it was so simple. "I have to go," I reiterated tiredly, blinking and continuing to walk in a semicircle around Booth on my way to the steps.

* * *

For the dreamlike state of my brain, where things were slow and just a little bit surreal, the contrast of my feet regularly impacting on the flooring was a bit jarring, but it was also such a little concern that I didn't really notice and I felt that much more out of it. The harsh hospital lighting felt like it was burning my eyes while I simultaneously didn't feel capable of noticing much more than what was intense and right on me – like the scratch in my throat, like I needed to cough.

Oncology had its own reception for the ward. "Hey," I said, and was distantly surprised that my voice wasn't as scratchy as it felt. The woman with her high blonde ponytail looked up at me curiously, a hand still on her desktop mouse. "Can I have the sign in sheet?"

She picked up a clipboard on the desk by her keyboard and put it up on the hutch of the reception. There was a pen clipped to it with Velcro. I blinked at it like I didn't know what it was for a second before I pulled the pen off and started to scribble my name messily.

"Kirkland," Cullen's familiar voice called, not sounding smooth but also not as weak and thready as he had over the phone. I looked up with my hand still in the process of writing the "D" at the end of my name to see him standing by the hall to the left of the desk, and he looked to the receptionist, who nodded.

"Here for Amy Cullen's family?" She asked in a sympathetic whisper. There was a gleam of pity or empathy in her eyes – I wasn't sure which – but her glossy lips were tugged in a frown and she was already reaching for the clipboard.

I nodded, and dryly said yes.

"Go on," she took the clipboard off the hutch and moved it back down to her working space. "I'll put in the time." She took the pen out of my hand lightly to fill in the last box on the chart.

I didn't say thank you. It was hard to figure out what I was supposed to do – it felt rude that she'd taken something out of my hand, it felt annoying that she was pitying me, it felt devastating and awkward that I was about to be face-to-face with my dead friend's parents, one of whom I've had a rocky start with.

Luckily, my feet moved me on autopilot. I was glad that my body could react even when my mind was a bit slow. It had saved my life a few times. I came up to the two of them by the bend in the hallway, but neither of them turned to lead me back down to Amy's room, and I felt a little sick when I realized she wasn't in that room anymore, nor was she really anywhere else.

 _Gone._

Cullen actually looked worse off than his wife, with his red face and bright pink eyes and untucked, uneven shirt and cuffs. Amy's mom was more composed. Her little button nose was bright pink and her eyes were puffy, but though I could see her fingers so tight on her handkerchief that they were turning white, she was clutching onto control just as tightly.

"Thanks for coming so quickly," she said, inhaling deeply and biting her tongue for a second. "They want her things out of the – out of the room. Quickly."

"I'm…" _What do I say to someone who just lost their baby?_ "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Cullen," I offered. My apology sounded hollow and meaningless. _Right, because that definitely made her feel better._

"Don't be." Cullen shook his head tiredly. The weariness of being a deputy director had never made him look so sullen and dull as Amy's death did. "If anything, we should be thanking you… you spent so much time with her…"

"We're making funeral arrangements quickly." Mrs. Cullen put a hand on her husband's arm and sniffed, but still held herself tall. I suspected it wasn't because she wasn't hurting, but rather because she wanted to give her husband the chance to hurt, too, and one of them needed to keep it together. "She said she didn't want us to dwell on it for a long time, so we're… we're handling it, but, I'll contact you."

"Of course," I said automatically, but wasn't too sure it was something I was supposed to actually respond to. It felt like it would've been more impolite not to.

"We wanted to give you these as soon as you were available. She wanted you to have them after she…" Cullen moved his arm from his side and I noticed for the first time that he'd been holding a couple of books. He looked down at their covers mournfully before holding them out. I almost didn't want to take them – they clearly reminded him of a part of his daughter. "… So here they are." Then again, his arms weren't shaking and his voice seemed certain enough, and I knew the man well enough to understand that if he didn't mean it, he wouldn't offer it.

I took them carefully. One was a sketchbook. It wasn't one of her larger ones, but it was decently sized, and from the smudges of colors on the edges of the pages, she'd put her clever talents to work in it. The notebook was a bit thicker, and there was graphite smudged on the edge and the leaves of paper weren't quite straight.

"Wow," I said softly, looking down at them. Amy had wanted me to have them. I wasn't sure why, but I wanted to know. And I wanted to _not_ know that they were the last form of communication I would ever have with her. The girl had become one of my closest friends. I had a relationship with her that I just couldn't build with anyone on my team because the context was so vastly different. "It's, um… thank you for letting me have these. I…" I looked between them, over Mrs. Cullen's shoulder, just on an impulse, and I hoped to see the way to Amy's room before it slammed into me all over again that it wasn't her room, she didn't have a room, she would never have a room. "I can't…"

They both noticed. The director's lips thinned and the mother nodded solemnly, looking over her shoulder in the same direction.

"I can't believe it, either," she admitted, voice wavering a touch. "I keep looking back and expecting to see her drawing on her books, but…"

As I'd predicted, Cullen switched his attitude to care for his wife's vulnerability. As she worried her handkerchief in a tight clutch, he put his arm around her protectively and dismissed me. He wasn't rude but he was pretty brief, but given the situation, I didn't care much. What else was there to do or say, anyway?

* * *

Even though Booth didn't really know what was going on, he had still kept me apprised of the situation with the case, sending me a couple of texts for updates. I checked my phone numbly while leaving the hospital and saw the one that said he and Brennan were going to question Kelly again, this time bringing up the evidence of the case and how it contradicted her story. I responded briefly that I was on my way, put my phone back in my pocket, and held Amy's books carefully during the entire trip on the subway to the right stop.

In the FBI, I went up first to Booth's office, which was left unlocked. Neither of them (or anyone else, for that matter) were inside. I let myself in, went behind the desk, and found a drawer with enough space in it for the notebook and sketchbook. I ripped off a page from the yellow notepad Booth kept on his desk, wrote my name in big capital letters, and laid it on top of the two before closing the drawer. This way they would be kept safe, and I could handle the case without distractions. I still needed to prove my abilities to Saroyan. I needed something to think about that didn't include how I would never see my friend again, never get another text from her.

As I had expected, Kelly was kept in one of the interrogation rooms. Her advocate was in there with her. Through the one-way mirror, I could see the lawyer trying to speak with her, and Kelly, with her hands clasped and held in front of her chin, was refusing to engage. I could imagine that the lawyer was frustrated, and very confused.

Booth wasn't in the observation room _or_ the interrogation room. I wasn't sure where he was – maybe getting coffee or speaking with another agent – but Brennan was watching Kelly, her head tipped, trying to analyze what was going on in the room. She didn't believe much in psychology, but behavioral psychology is hard for her to refute, and I know sometimes she wishes she were more apt at identifying signals of body language. Behavioral psych is, after all, largely based on nonverbal cues (which she knows exist) and the application of research to understand them.

"I'm back," I said, probably needlessly, pulling the door to the observation room shut behind me. It left the room looking dark and dull as ever, and it seemed more somber than it had ever before.

Brennan turned away from the glass and comfortably crossed her arms. "Where did you go?" She asked, her voice raised in question. Uncertainty and concern were clearly portrayed on her face. "You took off so fast-"

"Hospital," I interrupted her. I'd probably apologize for that later, but maybe she'd get it.

"Oh," she responded seriously. There was no good reason why anyone needed to hurry off to a hospital. She uncrossed her arms and put her hands in her pockets. "Is it Amy?"

"It was."

As soon as my words left my lips, I wished I hadn't said them at all. Although it was a way of explaining without actually saying the words, the past tense made my mouth feel dry. It _used to be_ Amy, but now, any time I go to the hospital, it _won't_ be.

Sometimes she needed things about emotions spelled out for her, but the anthropologist was no stranger to grief or to loss, and she realized what had happened without me needing to say any more than that. She was sympathetic. She was one of the few people who I wouldn't mind some sympathy from sometimes.

"Booth wanted to wait for you to talk to Kelly, since you're closer to her age." Brennan pointed through the one-way mirror behind her. "But if you can't… then I can-"

"I can still do my job," I interrupted her, feeling somewhat threatened. The grief hadn't fully hit me yet, I don't think, and if I can keep it together through all the other drama and stress I've had to deal with, then this shouldn't be what makes me break. She was just a kid who I'd only known a few months. Just some fifteen-year-old whom I'd _known_ wouldn't live to see her sixteenth birthday. I reached for the counter and took up an earpiece. "I'm going inside."

I pulled the hair back on the right side of my head to slip the hook over my ear and press the bud in. I turned the small switch on the outside of the piece to turn it on so it recorded and transmitted, fluffed my hair a bit so it covered it up, and went for the door quickly. In a way, it was an escape. Kelly's situation was awful, and I couldn't help but feel my heart (what was available of it at the moment) going out to her. That said, it needed to be handled and she needed to see that what she was doing wasn't actually going to help anyone, and truthfully, I hoped that the distraction of something else would help me stave off the actual emotional impact of the Cullens' daughter's death.

As soon as the door opened, both the lawyer and Kelly looked at me, but Kelly only cared for a minute and she didn't move her hands or change how she sat. The advocate had her lips pressed thinly, clearly not at all happy with how her client was failing to cooperate, but she must've realized that if Kelly were going to talk, then she would have by now, and didn't demand more time to counsel.

"Hey, Kelly," I said, ignoring the lawyer for the most part. The dark blonde woman wasn't the one being interrogated, and Kelly is old enough to grasp the situation without help. "Look, I'm having a pretty bad day, and I'm guessing you are, too, so why don't we just quickly get through this, starting with that I know you didn't kill Kevin Duncan?"

She put her hands down finally, her elbows and forearms remaining on the table. "I did, too," she argued.

The lawyer, Diana, reached for one of Kelly's hands. "Kelly, I don't want you to admit to anything more, alright?" The gesture was useless because as soon as she touched the teenager, the girl pulled her hands out of reach.

"No," I argued factually, briefly noting that the advocate just seemed thrown off balance by the odd roles in front of her. Usually, in an interrogation room, it wasn't the suspect who was insisting they committed a crime. "His _wife_ shot him, and she confessed so that you wouldn't take the blame. You _also_ didn't kill Dylan, and we know that, too."

"I did that," she insisted, her eyes a little red, glaring at me. I wonder if she was thinking of me as a threat to her brother. I almost wanted to tell her that I wasn't aiming to get Alex arrested as much as I wanted to keep her from being wrongly convicted. "I killed him all on my own. I shoved him out the window and watched him fall to his death." Again, I noticed, she didn't remember to include the pipe in her story.

Shaking my head again, I pushed evidence in front of her this time. If we had to, I knew that Booth would arrest Alex without Kelly's cooperation. We had enough, between forensics and motive, to connect her brother to the crime and explain how Kelly had fit in. I just didn't want her to have to go through the anguish of doing all she could and still failing to protect him. I hoped it would be easier on her if she gave in first so it didn't feel like she was so powerless and useless. I knew those feelings. They're not nice ones.

"We can forensically _prove_ that there was a third person present," I emphasized the word with a look at Diane, since Kelly wasn't looking at me, and then resumed trying to make eye contact with her. "The third person smacked Dylan with a rusting metal pipe. You took away the pipe, and the third person shoved Dylan through the glass of the window." I shrugged while Kelly started to cry again, pretending that her tears didn't bother me. "We know that he probably didn't _intend_ for Dylan to fall. But Dylan was unconscious, he couldn't catch himself, and the window broke too easily and he was too heavy for you to stop it."

"No. _No!_ It was _just_ me. _I_ hit him with the pipe, _I_ pushed him through the glass!" Kelly insisted angrily, reaching to her face. She rubbed underneath her eyes and bit hard on her lip as her voice wavered, trying to appear stronger than she felt.

Her stubbornness _almost_ irritated me, but I didn't have the emotional capacity to feel that much more, and all I registered was defeat and pity and sorrow. "Your fingernail polish and the rust from the pipe were found in the scratch marks on his arm. Those weren't defensive wounds. You grabbed him to try to keep him from falling through the window."

 _"_ _No!"_ She insisted, raising her voice at me.

I sighed. Her composure was cracking, but this was taking too long. "Okay, we'll do it the long way." I genuinely felt bad for her, knowing what was coming. If she thought _this_ was hard, wait until I added the emotional context.

"Dylan was special, right?" I leaned forwards over the table, crossing my arms and resting my elbows on the surface. She refused to look at me. "He made you feel like you had support and love and were safe and protected whenever you were with him." I wasn't sure how exactly it felt between lovers, but I felt supported and safe and protected sometimes with Booth and Brennan, so I knew it was one of the nicer sentiments I'd ever felt. "He was so sweet to you and treated you like you mattered, like you were precious and meaningful and not just some rebellious foster kid that his parents didn't trust." Now it just seemed like there were too many parallels between Kelly and myself to be purely coincidental. The reasons her story with Dylan was so picturesque were similar to the reasons I felt so close to my partners.

Kelly nodded her head a little, holding her hands over her face. I could see her lip trembling underneath her hands, and she was trying so hard not to cry and I knew she was failing. I would've felt bad if I hadn't known that I was only doing it to protect her.

"Not only that, but he was so great with your little brother! You weren't the only person who had to take care of him. Someone else cared, someone else helped, and you _never_ had to doubt that Alex was safe with Dylan." I didn't have anyone to look after the way that Kelly looked after her brother. Even now I didn't, because Parker had both of his parents, who were very responsible and attentive to him. "Most importantly, you believed him when he comforted you."

I still wanted to have that. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. It depended on how "comforted" was defined. Did I believe in the sincerity of the gestures of my friends? Most of the time, I could say yes to that. Was I actually comforted? That varied more often. I wanted to believe that there was a kind of relationship to have where even the attempts at comforting were always successful, though realistically, if anything, there would be times when the receiver would have to settle for just appreciating the intention.

Kelly dropped her hands and looked down to the table, her messy hair falling down around her face, snarled and knotted around the back of her neck and cut raggedly along her bangs. "Stop," she asked dryly, voice raspy and quiet.

"He promised you to stay together," I persisted. Even if I wasn't getting through to her, I was getting under her skin enough that she'd admit to the truth to make me stop. "To never stop believing in you, to give you everything he had, and you believed him, because… why wouldn't you?" Dylan had earned her trust and hadn't done anything to break it, like Booth had done for me. If he asked me to do something, I might complain and question why, but I'd probably do it.

"Yes," the blonde agreed mournfully. It was easier to agree to this – it didn't incriminate anyone. She rubbed her nose and sniffed, then nodded and let a tear race down her cheek and land on the table. Although a little late, she rubbed her cheek clean with her sweater sleeve. "Yes, I believed him."

I softened my voice. I wanted to prod her buttons, but I didn't want to be a bitch. Kelly didn't deserve it. "Suzanne told you in advance that she couldn't keep taking care of you and Alex both. It wasn't her fault, she just couldn't. You decided to take it into your own hands and run away with Dylan. He could help you stay safe." I wasn't sure how successful they thought they'd be, with his pushy parents who'd press for law enforcement to find them, and without any diplomas or degrees for well-paying jobs, but it was the romantic idea that counted, and sometimes family is more important than any of that practical stuff. "And your brother could stay with the one adult you'd trust to take care of him. Everyone would be happy that way, right?"

She looked away and to her right so she didn't have to see anyone else. "Dylan loved me," she whispered, giving up on keeping her face clear from her tears.

"I believe you," I told her, hoping it would give her some level of comfort. Besides, Dylan had a lot that he was willing to give up by running away, and that's a level of dedication I don't see too often. Maybe they were making irrational decisions, but they made perfect sense in the emotional context of infatuated and scared teenagers.

She looked up to me again. Her green eyes were pink and wet. "But I didn't tell Alex." She reached up and pushed her hair out of her face, blinking and crying into her sleeve. "He just – he just thought that Dylan was trying to take me away from him forever. I – I did it all wrong." I frowned and looked down empathetically. It wasn't a testimony against Alex, but it was basically a concession of her innocence. "It's not – it's not Alex's fault. It's my fault."

"It's _not_ your fault," I disagreed softly. Kelly sobbed into her wrists, but I knew that she was still listening, if only so she could intervene and do her best for Alex. Diane had to nod her agreement with me and she seemed close to crying, too. "I know what it's like to feel responsible for someone else's safety, and to blame yourself when you can't protect them, but you are _seventeen_. You don't have to handle the entire world all at once."

 _Aren't I seventeen, too? Why am I talking to her as though we're different when this whole time, I've been reminding me of myself?_

"And you _can't_ be held responsible for something your brother did. Alex didn't really mean to kill him, did he?" Kelly shook her head vigorously. "It was an accident. Alex was afraid that his only family was being taken away. Any jury would be compassionate. But we _cannot_ let _you_ pay for it."

* * *

Kelly didn't ever actually say that Alex had hit Dylan, but once she realized we had a full case against him and there was no way to put the smoking gun back in her own hand, she'd stopped trying to lie and frame herself. She just kept crying.

We waited until Booth had Alex in custody to let Kelly out of the interrogation room. We led her to Booth's office so that she could see her brother before he had to be charged. I wasn't sure what was going to happen to him – he was a kid who'd accidentally committed manslaughter. All I could hope was that he got a fantastic defense lawyer and that a jury would understand and go easy on him.

Kelly's social services advocate came with us, shepherding the devastated girl in case she ran off, but at this point I doubted she would. Not when that would just leave Alex all alone and with no shield. Booth's office door was open, Suzanne was sitting down and holding a tissue over her face, and Alex was standing, ashamed, in front of Booth's desk, his head down and his arms shaking.

Brennan knocked on the door to announce we'd arrived. Alex turned around and as soon as Kelly saw him, she pushed past me and ran into the room, grabbing her brother in a protective hug.

"I'm sorry," Kelly apologized, voice cracking and hiccupping. She held him tightly and pressed her face into his soft hair. "I'm sorry. I didn't tell them." Alex took his head off of her shoulder and looked up at her. Kelly let him push her shoulders back so there was more space between them. "They just –" She shook her head, the highlights swinging by her cheeks. "They just knew."

"It's okay," Alex mumbled quietly. By now, he already understood that the trick was up. "I'm sorry about Dylan."

Over their shoulders, I shared a look with Booth. His expression was dull and sad. This case was harder than most because there was no real bad guy to apprehend. It hadn't been murder, it had been a desperate accident. We couldn't feel like heroes as we arrested a child and split up a family.

* * *

The lab's loft hadn't lost all of its security. It was still where I found myself drawn to when I snuck out of the apartment after midnight, trying to escape before Brennan had questions for me that I didn't want to answer. I didn't want to talk to her about Amy. She hadn't really _known_ Amy. And I'm not the kind of person who likes to talk about what hurts. Any other time, her company would've been welcomed, but… not now.

I just couldn't stop crying. It was humiliating and awful. I had no one I wanted to go to while I was upset and that made me feel even worse. Lonely, alone, secluded, isolated. A little trapped, even. The voice in my head that sounded like Booth's was advising me to go see him, or even just go back home and stay with Brennan and say I didn't want to talk about it, but I didn't want them to see me cry. I was crying over something I'd _known_ would happen, how dumb was that?

I wasn't a very loud crier, but I must've made enough noise to be heard. It was surprising there were still people in the lab so late, but it wasn't odd enough to be alarming. I kept my face buried in my hands and sniffed to try to clear the congestion in my nose, letting my hair hang down in front of my face messily and hoping whoever it was wasn't someone who knew me.

That probably wasn't very likely to begin with, since I was in the _Medico-Legal lab,_ where I _worked,_ but it was still disappointing and stressful when the footsteps stopped and Zach stated in confusion, "I thought you were going home."

I slowly picked up my head from my hands. My hands were feeling warm and tingly from losing circulation with my elbows pressed on my knees, and I knew my eyes were red and puffy by now. I just looked ahead at the couch across from me. "I did," I answered. My voice was rough from my crying spell. "And then I came back because I have a roommate and I wanted to be alone."

Zach didn't move from his place. I could see part of his shadow and guessed that he was about five feet away, partly behind the sofa. "You're upset," he observed, a touch of concern finding its way into his voice.

 _Oh, you don't say? What part of me crying alone in my workplace indicates that I might be upset?_ "Yeah," I slowly, sarcastically confirmed. My tone was biting, and Zach didn't answer. I sighed and looked down, bringing my hands up and running them through my hair. "Yeah, I am," I repeated, forcing myself to sound nicer. Zach, I reminded myself, wasn't the most tactful, but he was far from deserving my ire. "I'm sorry."

"… Is there anything I can do to help?" He ventured, deeming it safe to stay.

I snorted softly. I needed a ton of help, most of it probably mental. What Zach could do on that front was limited. He and Hodgins already helped me more than either of them realized. That said, there was nothing he could do to change what had happened to Amy, or to externalize the process of grief I was feeling and stick a band-aid on it.

"Not unless you can resurrect people," I responded dully.

Zach's quiet footsteps resumed, but this time his shadow retreated. I took in a deep breath and leaned forward. So I was alone again. It was what I'd come here to find, and yet it impacted me differently. It felt worse to be walked away from than it had to do the walking away.

In the glass coffee table, I saw a reflection of my face. I grimaced. My face was all pink, my eyes were embarrassingly puffy. I self-consciously rubbed over my eyes again, gently, but all I really did was clear up my vision a bit from the next round of tears that had been trying to form. _Why am I like this?_ I almost asked my image. Not only did I have to cry, but I wasn't even particularly pretty as I did it.

I spent a couple minutes just waiting for the tears to come back as a full-fledged sob, but after Zach's brief interlude, they weren't coming. I sniffed and coughed wetly, grabbed a Kleenex, and blew my nose. It was probably time to go home, anyway. Brennan didn't control when I did what, but if I still wasn't home before she woke up, she'd probably call Booth. And that would start a whole thing I didn't want.

Right before I made my move and got up, I heard footsteps again. I stayed still and counted them. Two pair this time, and now that I wasn't busy with making waterworks like a damn sprinkler, I heard them before they came as close.

"Where is she?" The one closer asked softly. I rolled my eyes. _Fantastic, because I needed Hodgins to see me cry, too._ The chemist got closer, presumably with Zach following along, and he greeted kindly, "Hey there, Princess."

I knew his voice was nicer to coddle me, but it didn't feel patronizing and honestly I didn't have the energy to start an argument with someone I didn't ever feel like arguing with. I sighed and looked down so I didn't have to look at his face.

Hodgins took a seat beside me, leaving about a foot between us so I was more comfortable. He leaned forward, like I was, with his arms crossed and on his knees. "Zach came and got me because crying women are terrifying to him. He's never gonna make it in the real world," he casually remarked. "Really, what were those aliens _thinking_ when they made _him_ their scout?"

The running joke was so overused that it shouldn't have been funny anymore, but for some reason it was, and I giggled a little. I covered my mouth and tried to force myself to stop smiling. I shouldn't _be_ smiling. My friend _died._

Hodgins looked up for a minute and something nonverbal happened between him and Zach. I tried not to mind it too much. It wasn't really a big deal – besides, they were both my friends, and I think they were trying to be comforting.

"I don't have a manual on this, so if I say something wrong, give me, like, five seconds' grace period to get out of hitting distance, alright?" Hodgins checked. I reluctantly shrugged, and he clapped his hands once, rubbing them together dramatically. The man whistled to psych himself up, then dropped his hands both to his knees. "I've seen you when you were stabbed… Booth was blown up… Dr. B was shot at… and after they found your parents' remains, but you never cried then."

 _I didn't cry when Nick and Rosemary were found dead…_ I'm sure he meant to be helpful but he just made me feel worse. What kind of person doesn't cry when their kind, supportive parents – biological or not – are found dead in an unmarked grave? I groaned softly, feeling the pressure behind my eyes build again, and dropped my head back into my hands to preserve some dignity.

For just a second, Hodgins let his uncertainty get the better of him. "Whoa, no, that's not what I meant to happen!" He nervously laughed. "What I meant is that maybe you don't like other people knowing you're hurt, or maybe you try not to feel… but whichever one it is, when you come up here and stop crying, it has to be something really bad." His voice had become consoling and compassionate again, moving away from the momentary anxiety. "I know you think you _need_ to be alone, but you're not anymore. Me and Zach are here for you…" He trailed off and scolded, "Zach, what the hell, man? Get over here!"

I reluctantly looked up and to my left. Zach had been standing over to the side unsurely, not seeming like he was very "here for me" until Hodgins snapped at him exasperatedly. The engineer quickly hurried over and sat on my other side. I tiredly laughed again.

Neither of the men said anything next, but it didn't feel like it was an impatient or a tense silence. It was a comforting, companionable one. I thought briefly that it was kind of odd, but then realized that it really wasn't. Given my relationship with both of them, this would've been weirder if it were Booth and Brennan.

I took in a deep breath and rubbed my face, still self-consciously (and fruitlessly) hoping to rub away some of the redness. "Amy died earlier today," I admitted quietly, sure that they'd make the connection to the phone call earlier.

"Amy Cullen?" Zach questioned. "The girl with mesothelioma?" I winced at the reminder.

"She's been terminal for a long time, so I thought I could handle it, but…" I paused to shake my head wryly. I lifted my shoulders helplessly. I could lie with the best of them, but I couldn't stop myself from feeling sad. "I can't. I guess. Which is really annoying, because I _knew_ it was coming!" One of the roots of my frustration came back and I ground my teeth, chagrined.

"Hey," Hodgins objected, sounding just a little incredulous. "It is not a _bad_ thing to be sad that your friend died!" I shyly glanced up at him and saw the level of exasperation on his face now superseded that which he'd felt for Zach. "C'mon, Xena, what did you _think_ was going to happen? You thought that knowing her cancer was going to kill her would make it _not_ hurt when it happened?"

When I heard it come from someone else, I felt kind of silly, shrinking in on myself a bit defensively. Knowing that falling off something would result in a broken bone doesn't make it hurt any less when the bone is broken. It was kind of the same thing, but in a sense of emotional hurt, not physical. There's a sense of cause and effect there, and when it was put in perspective, I felt dumb for not seeing that the relationship exists because that's how causes and effects work, not because of any advance warning or spontaneity. It was normal to feel upset; it wasn't helping anyone, nor did it make any sense, for me to be upset about being upset.

"I wasn't supposed to have to run away from home in the middle of the night," I answered instead. The hesitation between what he'd said and how I replied, as well as my appropriately cowed voice, told Hodgins what he needed to know, and he nodded slightly and smiled about having helped a little. "Speaking of, what are you still doing here?"

The two glanced at each other and Hodgins quickly dismissed it. "Irrelevant," he declared. Zach shifted a bit on my other side. They were probably misusing lab privileges for fun again.

I shook my head. "You're both still _terrible_ liars."

"Look," Hodgins changed the subject again, changing how he sat so he was facing more towards me. "Different feelings, they come out differently whether you want them to or not." He reasoned pointedly. "You can't try to force yourself to respond with anger no matter what happens. Who are you going to be mad at here? Amy, for not getting better?"

 _No, of course not!_ That was stupid. It wasn't Amy's fault. She'd been the victim.

"Feel sad!" He urged enthusiastically. "Cry about it, so you can move on! You have to at some point. _No one_ is going to think less of you." He wiped his hands off on his jeans to signal that he was finished, and he stood up. "Hey, Zach, do us a favor and go lock up?"

Zach was more startled than I was. "We're not going to finish?" He asked bemusedly.

The entomologist hit him with a deadpan glare and held a hand out towards me indicatively. "Dude, our friend is crying her eyes out on the couch."

The grad looked at me, back up at Hodgins, and then slowly nodded. "Those are good priorities," he agreed. He stood up, too, leaving me sitting alone on the couch, but I didn't feel lonely.

While Zach left the loft to go back downstairs to Hodgins' lab, I peered up at Hodgins. "What are you doing?" I asked plainly, giving my eyes another rub. First he was encouraging me to cry, then he was closing up shop. Was he not going to leave me to cry in peace?

 _"_ _We,_ m'lady, are all going to leave." Hodgins raised an eyebrow at me in case I objected, but I didn't. Maybe he hadn't meant the instruction to cry about things quite so literally, or maybe he figured that I'd already taken the advice when I'd been crying earlier. He swatted the back of the couch. "If you were a few years older I'd take you to drown your sorrows in beer and strippers, but as it is I suppose I'll just have to take you to a movie instead."

"You don't have to do that," I objected automatically, impulsively wanting to shy away from anyone wasting time or energy on me.

"And _you_ don't have to keep who I am a secret from Goodman, Cam, Brennan, et cetera," Hodgins countered, beckoning with his hands impatiently for me to stand up. I put my hands on my lower back and stretched, feeling my shoulder pop. "But you do it anyway. You're not talking me out of this," he warned with a laugh, like he was just daring me to try it anyway. "Either you come willingly, or we bring the movies to you. Zach has a Blockbuster membership."

Internally, I was surprised that Blockbuster was still in business. To Hodgins, I just granted a small, reluctant smile. A theater was dark enough to hide the tear stains on my cheeks, anyway. "Okay, okay," I relented. There were worse things than spending time with worried friends. And as a bonus, these ones were already finished talking about feelings.

* * *

Booth announced himself as he entered the apartment when I told him it was okay, and he must've taken the key from underneath the mat to get in. I'd have opened the door myself if I hadn't been busy in the bathroom, covering my eyes with my hand and spraying my hair with a dust of hairspray to hold in the stylistically-made curls. Pink streaks made it look a bit less gloomy, even though my pantsuit was black and my eyeshadow smoky.

I looked at my reflection discontentedly and imagined my hair being uncolored. Even so, I was still dressed up. Dressing up felt too much like celebrating. Why the hell would I want to celebrate Amy's funeral? Why would I be joyous about her death? Yet if I wore what I normally would, then it would be disrespectful – either I offended myself or I offended her family. I had chosen to make the unselfish decision, and though I hated how I looked in the mirror on the principle of working to look nice for a funeral, I dealt with it.

I looked older than I was, I noted, and much older than Amy. More than two years older.

"What's this?" Booth called from the kitchen. I looked at my reflection and nodded briefly. My hair almost reminded me of Lucy Hale's from _Pretty Little Liars_ with the streaks and the curls, and I had pinned the long fringe out of my face with bobby pins that blended in with the natural color.

Walking out into the living room, I saw Booth standing over the kitchen counter, leaning against the edge and looking down on an application I'd left lying out on top of a mail folder. "It's an application," I said smartly, cocking my eyebrow at him. "I assumed you'd be able to read the top of the paper."

"For a gun permit!"

He sounded so surprised. I picked up my wallet from the small table at the edge of the couch, sitting innocently next to the lamp. Although Brennan wasn't home, Booth sometimes came by to check on me, so he knew where the extra key was and was a welcome house guest, both because he's our partner and my father.

"I told you I was going to get one," I reminded him shortly. I wasn't angry, I really wasn't, I just wasn't feeling like I was willing to put up with normal human interaction today. At least at funerals, it was acceptable to look upset and surly.

He sat up straight, taking his weight off of the countertop casually like he hadn't been looking through something that wasn't his. He was very F.B.I.-ish in that he didn't particularly see a problem with looking at things that were left out in plain sight.

"I never thought you were serious." He pushed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels, looking down at the paper on top. "I mean… 'Purpose for application to carry a concealed weapon: For reasonable protection and self-defense against dangerous criminals in the process of federal investigations.'" He whistled. "Wow, kiddo, that sounds… professional."

I lifted my shoulders and then dropped them carelessly. "I wanted to say 'to shoot bastards that deserve it' but decided that was less likely to be approved." I knew it sounded bad, but part of the luxury in having friends meant that Booth would know me better than to think that I would just shoot whenever I got irritated.

He nodded his quick agreement. "Yeah, you've got that right." No way anyone in the F.B.I. would approve of that kind of application, so I had to be an adult and channel Dr. Brennan while filling it out. He took his hands out of his pockets and pressed his palms down on the table, pushing against it and crossing his left foot over his right ankle. "Listen, kid, I know today's her funeral. Are you sure you want to send this in today?"

I started to throw him a glare. I resented the implication, however delicately phrased, that I wasn't thinking clearly. He's known since he met me that I'm a good shot, and if I'm mature enough to be armed when Booth wants backup, I should be mature enough to be armed, period, especially since I'm evidently being trusted to be in the field on my own (or, relatively alone, since I was sent out with Hodgins, who Kelly probably could've beaten up).

He didn't heed the unsaid warning and continued. "I mean, carrying a gun, it's a responsibility," he added, continuing to tell me things I already knew fully well. If I didn't think I could handle responsibility, I wouldn't be working in a job where carrying a firearm was a feasible necessity. "And it can be a serious one. Are you in the right mindset to choose to take that on?"

"I don't live with children," I told him, rolling my eyes and crossing my arms. I didn't want to defend myself – not today, of all days. "I can trust Dr. Brennan not to screw around with a weapon when I'm asleep. It's important to me that I'm not in that position with Kenton – or anyone else – again. This job is dangerous." I held out my hands earnestly and watched his face fall slightly. I knew that there had been a couple of weeks after I'd been stabbed where no one had been sure I'd come back to the lab. "It's great, but it's a risk, and I'm not going to be defenseless again." I took a deep breath and nodded. My chest hurt from expanding. My entire body felt sore from a restless night with almost no sleep. "I'm dropping it off on my way to the florist."

After spending a while on Google flipping between tabs on Brennan's laptop, I'd finally called a nearby florist. It was a pricier boutique than most other places in the District of Columbia, but it was one that had a wide variety of flora and did custom bouquets. It felt more personal and more meaningful than picking up a simple, typical funeral arrangement.

"Right." Booth nodded like he was expecting it, and then shook his head, admitting that he hadn't at all foreseen that coming out of my mouth. "Ow, wow. Well, that's-"

"Weird?" I asked, grimacing, because normally I didn't care too much for flowers.

He backed up quickly. "I was gonna say unusual," he amended.

"It's a funeral." I deadpanned.

"Right. Don't know what I was expecting." He put his arms up in the air in a nonchalant surrender and stepped away from the application that I was hell-bent on putting in. "Look, if you need a ride, or just… company?" He tried to act like he didn't know what he was suggesting. Mentally he was probably making a list of what to do in order to have something ready for me if I chose to go to his apartment. "Give me a call. I'll probably be up a while anyway, and I'll keep my phone turned on."

I could see through a lie fairly well, and this wasn't one that Booth had any motivation to put effort into withholding. It was very clearly structured to make it seem like he'd be bored and altogether not inconvenienced if I decided I needed him after the funeral, and while I appreciated it, I couldn't see myself taking comfort in a quiet evening with Brennan, let alone a night staying over at a much less familiar place with someone who wasn't as cool with moving about our lives individually. Brennan was there if I needed her, but saw nothing wrong with cooking our own dinners at different times and typically ignoring each other in favor of other things that demanded attention. If I wasn't cool with being "alone" with someone there, I couldn't see myself being cool where I wasn't even allowed to pretend I was alone.

"I'll be fine," I said, choosing not to call him out on it. There was no need to be a bitch; my antisocial habits weren't the healthiest, but he'd always gone out of his way to put up with them. Offering to make himself available for comforting purposes wasn't something he deserved to have blown up in his face. "But thanks."

* * *

Amy had a beautiful funeral that I think she would've loved. I wore the same pantsuit I'd worn to Brennan's mom's funeral, but had brought different flowers. I held the bouquet in my hands for the entire service until it came the time to pay respects. I got caught in the procession between people I didn't recognize, and didn't pay them much attention, and I laid my small but earnest collection of flowers on her smoothly-polished coffin.

The pastor said a few more words. Amy's family was traditionally Baptist, though she'd considered herself more agnostic, especially towards…

There was a small reception after the service which was unofficially commenced when the pastor closed his book, signaling the end of his religious duty at the ceremony. A little less than half of the attendants left, quietly picking up their sweaters or jackets and finding their way out of the modest little cemetery.

I stayed a couple of extra minutes to wait for the movement of people to slow down, so there would be less of a crowd to move through. I stayed in my seat in the third row, staring ahead at the gorgeous photograph of Amy on top of her coffin. She wouldn't be buried until after the reception, and then her father would help fill in the grave.

 _She was only fifteen._ Amy had barely gotten to _live_. It wasn't fair that she had to die.

It didn't come as a surprise to me when Cullen sat down. I'd seen him in my periphery, but hadn't had the energy to acknowledge. I figured that with Amy gone, whether or not we had anything to say to each other was on his shoulders to decide. He took the chair at my right, vacated by some middle-aged woman who'd struggled but managed not to cry over the lost girl.

"You brought flowers." Cullen stated. He didn't look directly at me. I returned the favor. We just pretended not to really interact.

"Lilies, roses, hyacinth, and hollies," I confirmed, looking at each kind in turn from the bouquet as I said them.

I had chosen my flora carefully. Amy had loved roses. Her favorites had been red ones, but I'd chosen a pale yellow color for them because everything online said that that was the color to represent friendship. I paired them with more roses in darker, not-too-bright pinks for gratitude and thankfulness after all that she had done for me, even if she didn't realize it. Hyacinth were for grief, and they looked nice at funerals. The lilies were more private – both a comment on Amy's youth, and a kind of quiet commiseration for that she'd died before she got to experience a lot of the things she had hoped for. I knew she'd never told her parents that she was upset she had to die before ever having a serious partner, before ever having the experiences like kissing and sharing a bed and having sex – all parts of relationships that were so very _human._ More than her upset at not being able to see the world, she was angry and bitter about being cheated out of having most of her _life_.

"Hollies." If Cullen knew there was a meaning to any of the others, he didn't let on or ask about them. He snorted softly. "Cute."

"She would've thought so," I agreed. Amy's amusement was the sole reason I'd included those. I knew there was no point – that she was dead and the flowers couldn't amuse her at all – but it had still felt like the right choice to make, so I didn't overthink it.

"Thank you for coming."

"Thank you for inviting me."

Having attended the funeral didn't make me feel much different. If her family hadn't wanted me there, I wouldn't have been there. It was nice, though, to see that everything was taken care of for her; that she was being said goodbye to with respect, dignity, and grace. Those things would've mattered to her.

And then, just like that, things were taken off of Amy and it was business. "You submitted for a carrying permit," he stated blandly.

"You had my name tagged," I accused, equally mild. There was no other way he'd have known so soon.

He thought for a moment. "I'll approve it."

"Personally approved by the deputy director of the FBI," I mused, keeping my back straight and my eyes ahead to honor the boundary we'd unanimously set. "I'm flattered."

"Long as you don't start shooting whenever you get irritated," he mumbled, "There's not enough ammo for that."

"He was trying to light me on _fire._ We're still not over it? _"_ The exasperation in my voice was rehearsed, left over from a dozen previous iterations. It was old news, but it was comfortable.

Cullen sighed and shuffled his arms to cross over his chest, leaning into the back of the chair. "It's old news," he sighed. "It's over. For me, too… I'll have it passed through, but from then on, if you begin getting a little too trigger-happy, you'll be arguing with the new director."

My surprise led me to look to the side at him, startled out of the unspoken agreement. "You're resigning?" Cullen had always seemed like the kind of man who worked too hard and too much. The idea that losing his daughter would drive him to quit working instead of nudge him to work longer hours wouldn't have occurred to me.

He still didn't look at me, but he nodded. "I think I've seen a little too much to keep doing this." _Fair,_ I thought, _considering a case investigated his own daughter's murder._ "My wife needs me," he added, although I think that was more for appearances' sake. Sure, his wife probably did need him; but there was a big difference between taking a leave of absence and permanent resignation. "And Amy's passing is just the last straw."

"You were a pretty good director," I noted. "I won't forget that you gave me the assent to work with the bureau." It felt like a whole lifetime ago that Cullen had assigned Booth to keep me alive. I wasn't sure why I was reprising old events and stating the obvious. It just felt appropriate. It seemed like the kind of thing people did. "I owe you."

Finally, Cullen turned his head slightly to the left and made eye contact with me. "Not after what you've done for my daughter," he stated matter-of-factly. "After all this, I think I'm the one who might owe you."

I exhaled and looked straight ahead again, back to Amy's coffin. "No. You don't."

Being there for Amy hadn't been about her father. Being there for Amy had been about being there for my friend.

* * *

At some point, Wong Foos had fallen out of favor as the preferred in-person dine-in restaurant, though I wasn't all too sure why. Booth and I both still picked up take-out from Sid at least once every couple of weeks, but since he'd found the Royal Diner, that had become the new favorite. It had a much different atmosphere than the Chinese place, but it was almost friendlier, between the very talkative but well-meaning staff and the bright lights.

I was wishing I'd thought to wear a heavier jacket instead of just this nice-looking blazer when I walked through the doors. Walking was still my usual mode of transportation. I knew the city well and didn't have my own wheels. If nothing else, it was exercise. The Royal Diner's scent drew me in, food in the deep-fryer, and tonight someone must've ordered a spicy drink because it smelled like cinnamon and nutmeg behind the register.

One of the people behind the counter tonight was Joanne. I didn't know her last name because it wasn't really pertinent, but she liked speaking to the customers, and when it became apparent that I was going to be a frequent face, she plowed right through my whole "I don't like to make friends" thing. She was wearing her white and gold diner uniform, the skirt passing her knees, and her hair was pulled up in a messy bun with pins stuck in to hold it in place, the blonde almost too sharp to look natural with her skin tone, but very complimentary regardless.

"Heya Kirkland, what can I get you tonight?" She asked, perking up behind the register as soon as the little bell over the door rang when I pushed it open. I shivered again as cold air was battled away from the heat. Joanne leaned over the cash register with a bright sparkle that seemed ever-present, promising mischief and kindness in equal measure.

"Just a coffee, thanks," I murmured, walking up to the register to pay for it. The diner has free Wi-Fi, so I considered plugging in headphones and going onto Netflix on my phone. At least here I could mostly trust that strangers wouldn't bother me, and if Joanne saw me getting outwardly upset she'd come over with a mug of hot chocolate piled high with whipped cream and a ripe cherry.

"Want something to eat, too?" Joanne offered, motioning with one hand directly down. Underneath the register there was a section of cooler taking up part of the space before the bar seats began, in which they stored prized options of various selections of pie and a few other desserts, like cannoli and pastries. I didn't really trust the cannoli. In my experience, the best cannoli comes from authentic Italian restaurants. "A little evening snack?"

My stomach wouldn't have protested to any food, but I didn't want to converse and really if I ate it would be for comfort, not necessity, so I shook my head. "No, thanks. Just the coffee."

She looked at me closely. The waitress must've seen something, because one of her eyebrows went up. "I'll start a tab in case you change your mind," Joanne told me kindly, and I shoved my wallet back into my back pocket. The way she said it didn't come off as patronizing, just as motherly, like the way I imagine a parent would coax a child to eat.

Having been here enough times to know what kind of coffee they had, I ordered my favorite kind each time. Joanne went to the coffee maker and made sure the dark liquid was piping hot before she poured it into a white mug. Then she went to the coffee sides and added in a couple of packets of liquid French Vanilla creamer, took a very thin red coffee mixer, and stirred the creamer in. A few seconds later she pulled it out and tossed the stirrer into a trash bin.

I looked into the rest of the diner to my right, looking out the window. Having all of the walls filled in with glass made it more scenic and less claustrophobic than a small corner diner should be, yet the mood of the restaurant just made it work. In the daylight, the walls let in all this sunshine and brightness. After the sun went down, it let patrons look outside and see the streetlights and advertisements and cars. If it was raining, then the water splattered on the sides of the walls with no discernible pattern.

There were very few people here. Given the time of day – well, night, I supposed, as the sun was inching down further and further every time I looked – it wasn't very surprising, but when I looked over the people around me to stay aware of my surroundings and take notice of any threat, my eyes landed in surprise on Saroyan, who, by the looks of it, had already noticed me. A black coat covered her arms and was pulled around her neck for the warmth, a cup of coffee next to her and a large order of mostly uneaten fries on the table.

I didn't know what it was that made me come here rather than retreat to the safety and peacefulness that came within the apartment I shared with Dr. Brennan, but I certainly hadn't been intending on running into the new boss that I have all but burnt the bridge with. I feel like I've come close enough – vandalism, attempted arson, that sort of thing.

She locked eyes with me and raised one hand, mouthing 'come over' as she crooked her finger in summons. I didn't reply, but bit down touchily on the inside of my lower lip while I regretted coming here. This was supposed to be an escape from pretty much everything, not a walk right into the coliseum to be released with the lions.

"Thanks, Caffeinator," I said to Joanne when she stopped humming and carried my coffee back to the front counter. Joanne stood up ramrod straight and lifted her hand to her forehead in a salute before she broke stance and laughed. I took the coffee in my right hand and enjoyed being able to focus on the stinging pinpricks in my skin caused by the heat burning my hand, and I went to Saroyan's table, like she had asked.

Although Saroyan was in a place I felt I had very clearly added to a list of my frequent haunts, I was feeling too many other sensations to really process anything as a result of her sitting down at the booth and looking up at me. Whoop-de-doo, we went to the same restaurant in a huge city such as DC. What a big deal. What was really more noteworthy was that the heat of my coffee was starting to seep through the cardboard to burn my hand, and for the sake of looking completely unperturbed, I just stood there holding it like a badass.

"You found this place?" I asked, and my tone sounded… off, even to me, like I wasn't quite paying attention or speaking with the right timbre. My hand wanted me to sit down. My legs wanted me to sit down. If she were a stranger I'd have walked past. If she were anyone else who had a job at the Jeffersonian, I'd have sat down without a second thought.

"Booth recommended it." Saroyan didn't look at all shocked by my attire. I should've been cowed about being caught being very not sick when I'd called in a sick day. Instead I just kind of felt proud that I'd proved I could lie and be a rebel, if a little curious as to what she'd do about it. "So far the only regrets are ordering so many fries." She smiled and pointed down at her plate.

I inhaled deeply while I considered the situation. "They are pretty good," I concluded honestly.

Her posture shifted like she was moving her legs and she sat up with a straighter back. "Please, sit down." Courteously, she indicated the opposite side of the table, and then gave the edge of the plate of fries a quick push. The dish ground a few inches over to the center of the table. "Have some. Save me from myself."

Pain won out over the mental debate that was arguing for the likelihood of that she might be trying to poison me with the French fries, and I put down the burning coffee on the table and sat down decisively across from her. Instead of sliding into the booth to sit in the center or closer to the window, I stayed near the aisle to get up and leave quickly if an escape route became necessary.

I took the leap of faith that Saroyan knew better ways to kill me than to sneak rat poison onto the diner's French fries and picked one up off of the plate, pretending that there was nothing strange in the context and waiting for the punchline to become apparent. The new boss and the belligerent employee who knew how to lie better than she knew how to ask for help. There was something wrong with how we were just sitting here in companionable quiet and eating French fries when she'd threatened to fire me and I'd taken every opportunity to express my displeasure with working under her.

It was worse because it wasn't just me that she was threatening to fire. I had to protect Brennan when I could. I almost felt bad for Brennan's job being jeopardized, but I was logical enough to replay the situation and see that Brennan had brought that herself, just like I had earned any discipline I received. We were extremely unruly employees. I suspected that some of the things I had said would've come out of Brennan's mouth sooner or later if it weren't for my short temper and sharp tongue, and my lack of willingness to filter myself when I felt like there was an injustice going on.

"I think we need to talk." Saroyan said as if in admittance that she hadn't just lured me over here for my delightful company.

"Yeah, me, too." Something had to give. I could keep my ego and continue this road, or I could try to at least put some band-aids over the breaking bridge before it crumbled. This had gone on so much further than I had thought it would, and reached so much further than I had expected. I wanted a gun, I wanted a job, I wanted the respect she'd give a qualified expert – it all meant I wanted to be an adult. It was about time to prove I could act like one, too. "Find a replacement yet?"

Saroyan smiled and shook her head. The short hairs that weren't long enough to make it into her ponytail were also too short to be moved very much by the motion. "I never started looking."

"Oh?" My eyebrows rose up my forehead. I may have taken her as a lot of things, but one to make empty threats was not one of them.

Her lips were still pulled up into a half-smile. "Dr. Brennan is the best forensic anthropologist in the country, possibly in the entire _continent._ I want her on my side." Ah, so it was a tactical decision. I still wanted to know how she intended to fix the fight to convince Brennan that there wasn't going to be a huge dispute every time they had differing opinions. Different approaches, especially in an investigation without clear leads, was unavoidable, but it was usually handled better than we had taken it. "I want _you_ on my side, too, but clearly we're having some control issues."

"Clearly," I added, trying not to sound very clipped. I saw what she was doing and appreciated that she was the first to reach out. Like with asking for help, it was hard for me to ask for social re-dos. "I'm not too egotistical to admit you were right about the pipe." The exact pipe wasn't a complete necessity, but Alex's D.N.A. almost inevitably on it would make it much harder for Kelly to martyr herself for her brother.

She turned over a hand towards me, looking a little surprised but reciprocating the notion. "You were also right. About the rose, I mean. Might not've found Kelly without it." If Kelly had been a little more seasoned and a bit less of a romantic, she might've disappeared into the wind and we wouldn't have found her.

I looked at the table. My hand itched for coffee, but I told it 'no' because I knew the liquid would still be too hot to drink. This was nice, but I was still pissed about her assumptions about foster children. It was painful and offensive to think that those were the things she'd expect of me, given the knowledge of how I grew up going house-to-house until relatively recently. It was angering that that was what she'd have thought of Brennan. Neither of us were fortunate to have foster homes in which we were safe and supported. Brennan reacted by focusing on her education. I chose to retaliate instead.

Unfortunately, even if we resolved the problems that rose from this case, there was still the dramatics from our first case together, and the lack of trust and abundant suspicion from last week's case. And unless we came to an agreement about how to handle the differences that we apparently had aplenty, we'd be trapped having the same bad reactions to each other every case until something broke that was a lot less easy to fix than our nerves.

"We've got a pretty big problem," I said, drawing it to light a little reluctantly. This bad workplace attitude isn't just hurting me; it's hurting Saroyan, it's hurting Brennan, it's hurting Booth, Zach, Angela, and Hodgins, and I hate being the cause of them hurting, so it's my responsibility to stop doing that.

"Uh-huh." She picked up a fry and dipped it in a pool of ketchup on her end of the oval plate. "Do you see a solution?"

I noncommittally hummed. Though picking at the fries, I wasn't particularly hungry. Anything I ate would be for comfort – and wasn't that a thought! When I met Booth, I ate to survive, because while I technically could afford to do more frequent grocery shopping, I never felt secure enough financially to spend more money than I strictly had to, in case I needed it for a medical or legal emergency. Brennan has a healthy appetite and a more or less regular meal schedule, but she must have realized somewhere along the line that I don't have a schedule for when I eat, and as long as she sees me make something before she goes to bed, she never tries to enforce alternative dietary habits.

There were several potential solutions to the problem posed; the larger fraction, however, were either improbable or unfeasible. Saroyan wasn't going to leave the Jeffersonian. I sure as hell wasn't going to. With options involving those off of the table, what remained were more limited in their scope.

"Have you talked to Dr. Brennan?" I queried, because when coming up with a truce, I think I'd much prefer to have her doing the negotiation with Saroyan while I support her and object or clarify if I think something needs to be added.

"I have." She dipped her head once like she'd expected the question. _Damn it. I'm getting too predictable._ "And we've worked out an arrangement." It must've been done fairly recently, I figured; as in, today, because otherwise Brennan would have told me about it. "I wanted her to relay it to you, but she said that I should speak to you personally."

 _That._ That was a big part of why I preferred Brennan to a lot of adults. While still believing that I'm too young to not have fun or enjoy life or have a wide array of opportunities, she still treats me as an adult, with more respect than I get from anyone else. Although having it sent through a messenger wasn't exactly disrespectful, it was much more inclusive to actively keep me in the loop, especially by having me speak directly with our "opponent," so to speak.

"I would've called," Saroyan continued, either not noticing that I'd been partially distracted or trusting me to multitask. "But Booth told me you had somewhere to be." She looked over my hair. A lot of the heat had dissipated by now and the curls were falling out, even with the hairspray in it. That's what happened in the colder weather. While the summer temperatures descended, we were getting cold breezes and two-blanket nights. "Not exactly sick today, were you?"

Normally I'd have been smug at being able to make her seem not only wrong, but also tactless, but given the circumstances, I just couldn't. "I went to a funeral," I said flatly, and Saroyan's slightly cynical face fell immediately as she realized the mistake in her thinking.

"Oh. I'm sorry for your loss." She managed to sound contrite and consoling at the same time, although I wasn't sure how much the consolation was supposed to mean, given that it was still practically a miracle we were getting along so far without anyone mediating us. No one could really express their full sympathies without having known Amy, because they couldn't possibly know what I was going to be missing.

What I was missing, in fact, was probably in what she'd left for me, like my name drawn on a note and stuck on a belonging was a last will and testament. For a fifteen-year-old, it might as well be. Amy never did get to get her permit to drive – as her conditioned worsened, she was allowed out of the hospital, even in brief excursions with her parents, less and less. Her health declined, until I wasn't sure if the paleness and sallow tone of her skin came from chemo and failing organs or from not being able to go out and be under the sun.

"Her name was Amy." I murmured, looking at the lid of my coffee so I wasn't looking at the pathologist. I don't know what possessed me to give out more information, but I guess that thinking about her made me want to share her. Subconsciously I probably thought that if I kept her memory alive, it wouldn't seem like she was quite so gone. That seemed like the kind of thing a therapist would say, anyway.

Kindly, Saroyan gave me her full attention and concern, and in that moment I learned what had drawn in the others to her so quickly. When she wasn't being authoritative or rude (which she was very good at being, but, to be fair, so was I), she seemed so sincere. When she acted like she cared, I couldn't help but feel like she meant it, even though Amy was a girl she'd never even heard of, much less met.

"What happened?"

"I met her as she was diagnosed with terminal mesothelioma." I shook my head, still a little bit stunned. I was waiting for it to hit me that she was dead. I'd been preparing for it for a long time, but after that initial shock, there hadn't been… it felt like I was going through the motions of grief, not actually feeling it, and I was terrified of it either way. Did it mean that I had already felt the extent of my grief? Or did it mean that the devastation wasn't going to come? "Her time just ran out, I guess." Discretely, I pushed fringe out of my face and sniffed, blinking. I didn't want to cry. It just felt like I should be, I guess, so my body responded. Like I'd said – going through the motions. "What was the deal you worked out?"

 _I'm here because Booth expects me to want to speak about Amy and Brennan expects me not to want to talk, period, and neither of them are right, but I can't hold either of them responsible because I'm the one who keeps myself so hidden._ _Please let us go back to talking about our feuds at work._ I didn't want to keep thinking about the friend I just watched be buried, or the small gaggle of her friends from high school that had come to see her less and less, or the incessant crying of her mother that got on my nerves and then made me angry at myself that I was insensitive enough to be annoyed by the sobbing of a woman who just lost her child.

"Have you ever played Monopoly?" She asked, transitioning the topic back to what it originally was. I nodded. _Who hasn't?_ Then I probably realized that if anyone wouldn't know what Monopoly was, it would be Brennan. "I'm offering her a certain number of get-out-of-jail-free cards per unit of time."

That seemed… nice? I'd have felt surer of my opinion on the matter, but in order to use a get-out-of-jail-free card, you'd have to be in jail first, which was the part that I most wanted to avoid. "In which she's forgiven for mutiny?"

"In which she can exercise her authority over mine as she sees fit," Saroyan clarified. I nodded to show my understanding. It was a power thing. "Conversely, I do have a number of declines when I choose to veto." Which I'd really seen coming. "Is this a suitable compromise for you?"

It wasn't quite clear to me if she was offering the same deal to me or if she was trusting that I would, most if not all of the time, trust Brennan's judgment. My problem with Saroyan, though, wasn't about the practices at the lab (for the most part, and Brennan could take care of it when there was one). It was about respect and equality, and the power struggle we'd been not-so-quietly having. As the forensic experts, they would be best suited for determining the leads. I had a better people sense than Brennan, but that pertained to living people, which was the field work I did with Booth, not in the lab.

"What I was objecting to was never working under you." I closed my hand around my coffee, which was still uncomfortably hot but minimally cooler. I gripped the cup to keep my pride in check and met her eyes honestly. I don't object to having a boss. Goodman was my boss, and I'd been fine with that. He had also given me the benefit of the doubt when the Jeffersonian team vouched for me, and as a result, had treated me like a capable adult. "It was about wanting to be shown respect and equality in the workplace."

Saroyan winced and didn't bother covering it up. There were certainly more than a couple of times that came to mind in which she'd given me less than the desired respect. To her credit, I had responded in kind and encouraged the cycle.

"I know that I'm not an orthodox employee. And I…" I let out a deep sigh. "I know that I don't always make myself the easiest to get along with, but I was given a place at the Jeffersonian because of my abilities. And I can understand you wanting proof of that, but you have to give me the opportunity." Saroyan had been trying to hold me at an impasse, in which she wouldn't trust me if she didn't know I could prove my worth, but didn't want to give me the chance. "Don't… disregard what I say, or undermine my knowledge, or assume that my reasons are immature or petty. Don't try to have me stay on the sidelines or keep me away from suspects. If I screw up, _then_ be doubtful, but until then…"

I lifted my shoulders. The rest of it seemed pretty obvious.

"I can cop to a boss, but it's… it's really hard for me to do that if I feel like I'm giving in to pressure. And in my experience, when I give to someone else's pressure, it means that I'll only be subjected to more, so…"

"And this particular case was much worse than the others," she reasoned unexpectedly. It was unexpected because it felt like she was trying to sympathize with why I'd acted as I had and given her such a hard time. I just kind of stared at her thoughtfully. She knew it was worse because she knew I'd been a foster child. She noticed me looking at her and seemed a little guilty almost immediately, realizing she'd given away that she knew. "What?"

"Booth told you I'm a foster kid," I stated simply. I'd have figured it out from that even if I hadn't been eavesdropping.

She opened her mouth, conflicted, but then she became resigned. "Yes. He did," she admitted. "But with a good heart and a warning not to tell you, so I'd really appreciate it if you didn't let him know." I pushed my tongue against the inside of my cheek and then agreed. Booth was one of those people that meddled if he felt the need, but didn't want to be credited for it, even when it turned out well. He liked helping from the outside. "And I apologize for the generalizations made," she added. I smiled slightly. This was the progress I'd wanted. "I realize now that they were not only unnecessary, but also insensitive, and I can't blame you for the negative response. I realize the way I've been behaving has been…" She looked around towards the door as if literally searching for the word before she decided on the correct but delicate, "Untoward. It's strange that you work here at your age and without a degree."

It wasn't an excuse for the way I'd been treated at times, but it was a form of reasoning that I couldn't at all disagree with. It was a miracle I was taken seriously by half of the suspects and families. It didn't help that, until recently, I'd been dressing from Wal-Mart and looking the part of a cheaply-dressed kid with my jeans and sweaters.

"Yeah, tell me about it," I agreed instead, chuckling a little. Saroyan broke into a smile.

She leaned over the table on her elbows again, more friendly than before. "So, I promise to stop being overly authoritative towards you and to let you show that you can handle the job just like anyone else on our team, if you promise to be less confrontational and observe, when necessary, that I am in the position of authority."

"That's… acceptable," I decided, drawing parallels between her proposed resolution and Goodman's form of leadership. They weren't the same, but it seemed like a very similar role – to ultimately be the boss, but to trust my judgment and work ethic. Obviously, with Saroyan working in the Medico-Legal lab, the interactions would be different than they were with office-bound, administrative Dr. Goodman, but another face in the lab wasn't a problem. "I'm still not going to be your best friend," I warned. "I'm with Dr. Brennan all the way."

"I expected you would be." She was still smiling and she tipped her head. "That's okay. I can do with some loyal coworkers." I murmured an agreement along with the same sentiment as her smile lessened. "God knows there aren't enough."

I nodded emphatically, having a very strong opinion on traitorous coworkers, thanks to the scar on my stomach that would never really go away.

"So, how long do you feel like staying?" Saroyan pulled another fry through ketchup. I guess that was it for the professional things that needed to be addressed, but that left me wondering where we stood and why, exactly, I should stay. Was there actually enough of a common ground for me to stay?

"I don't know," I said, opting for being truthful. Even if I didn't know what she wanted out of the conversation – or the rest of the day – she probably knew, where she was concerned. "I mean, to be honest, I was thinking I would go off to the park before going home. I don't want to be home, but I think if I'm actually alone for more than two minutes I'll sit down and cry." Raising my coffee, I took a sip. The creamer was rich and the coffee was smooth, but hot to the point that my tongue stung from it in a delicious way. I hoped she understood that, because it was as clear as I could make it.

She swallowed her fry and reached for her coffee, which, by now, had stopped steaming a long time ago. She wasn't worried about it burning her tongue, I noticed. "And what's wrong with that?" She asked, putting it down on the table again and licking her lips. "Seems normal."

 _What is wrong with crying?_ I thought, and I paused before I answered, leaning back against the booth behind me.

I used to cry a lot more than any child should have. Kind of a side effect of being an abuse victim, I supposed. But then I grew up, and the older I got, the less I cried. The less I cried, the more I hated crying, and the more I hated myself whenever I did. I couldn't remember crying when I was stabbed, although I was sure I must have at some point. Everything had seemed to crystal and acute in the moment, but had since blurred, both thanks to the trauma my mind and body suffered and the drugs that I was introduced to not long afterwards. That was a memory I doubted would ever clear up, and I wasn't sure if that was a bad thing.

Like I was questioning my views on other perspectives I held, I questioned my view on crying. It was okay if someone else cried. Brennan cried when she found her mother's bones in limbo. I had reacted sympathetically, gotten her excused from work, taken her to her car, and driven her home so she wasn't emotionally compromised and navigating D.C.. traffic. Angela had cried when her boyfriend was murdered in the desert, and I had offered her as much comfort as I could, giving her tissues and water. Booth had come very close to crying at Arlington National Cemetery when he told me about the Serbian mass murderer he'd killed, and I'd actually hugged him, let him hold onto my hand to the point that his grip was getting close to uncomfortable.

Never once had I thought less of any of them for being sad enough to cry. I'd thought it was normal. I'd encouraged it for the emotional release. I'd tried comforting them afterwards. So why was I holding myself to standards that I didn't expect from anyone else?

 _Because I've been trained to believe that crying will only make my situations worse._ Well, that's something that I just need to get out of my head. Unfortunately, unlearning habits drilled into me for my entire life is going to take a lot more than just realizing that I'm forcing unfair double-standards onto myself. It's going to take time and patience, and the willingness to reteach myself.

"Life has done a good job of teaching me that crying doesn't actually help anything," I said to Saroyan honestly. It was the truth, even if it was a modified version that eliminated the reasons why. Actually, if I was done alternating between wanting to pull her hair and throw scalpels at her, she could be exactly the kind of person that would help me readjust to my new kind of life: honest, blunt, and, while thoughtful, very aware of social norms.

Saroyan heard my response, but then she tossed her head to the side, black hair swishing. The color reminded me of my own hair, minus neon streaks, except the texture of hers was different – the pathologist's hair was straight and soft-looking, while mine had a natural wave and bounce.

"Life's a bitch sometimes," she declared, sounding very stubborn like she'd had personal experience with life being exactly that. Wise words. "Or a lot of the time," she amended on second thought, and mimed holding a hand in front of her, making a fist, and yanking. "Sometimes you just need to grab it by the hair and remind it who's boss."

I started to smirk. That seemed very fitting to her personality. I appreciated her sense of humor. "Crying won't help me do that," I pointed out, because if anything, crying seemed less like tugging its hair and more like rolling over onto my back and letting myself be trampled.

"No, not on its own," she agreed, picking up another fry and swirling it in the ketchup a few times. She was thinking about something. I just raised my eyebrows, begging an explanation for the specific answer I'd gotten. "Oh, don't look at me like that," she reproached. There wasn't any sting. It was like when I told Hodgins not to call me a princess; I didn't really mean it. "Crying sucks. I hate it. Your sinuses get all congested, your nose runs, your face and throat get sore and it hurts to blink. Then there's the lines that take hours to go away." The scientist rolled her eyes, looking aggrieved just at the thought. Then she softened her expression to one of kindness. "But after you've done a little bit of crying, you usually feel like there are less explosives in your emotions and it's easier to handle things."

She blinked at me when I didn't immediately reply to her and shrugged her shoulders, dropping them down again carelessly like she hadn't just given me a profound pep talk on how to handle my feelings when they got to be too much.

"And if not, you still get a pass for a long nap," she finished.

I cracked a smile. I didn't know what else to do, and smiling wasn't exactly going to kill me, was it? "I don't know any more if you're encouraging me to cry at my feelings or reassert control over my life." Somehow the two messages had blended.

She looked straight at me over the plate of French fries. There was probably something symbolic about those fries, but I wasn't thinking poetically enough to figure out what it was. "Do a bit of both or neither will help."

"That's wise," I said, both genuinely and in jest.

"Don't knock it 'til you try it, kid," she started to grin right back at me. "There are a lot of things you don't know about me."

"Like?" I prodded mischievously.

It amazed me that Saroyan was getting such a good reaction out of me without me playing charades or putting up a façade for anyone's benefit. I went from wanting to curl up and cry in solitude to feeling like it was _okay_ to want to cry, even though I didn't really want to.

"Don't even start." She waved a fry at me in place of her finger, and it reminded me of a particularly flamboyant orchestra instructor that had taught at one of the high schools I'd briefly been in. Instead of waving a baton, she was waving a French fry. Now, if she'd just start waving it in four-four cut syncopated time… "Firstly, I don't want to be alone either." That made me stop smiling and look at her in surprise. "So put down the cocoa and pick up some fries, woman." She pointed at the plate with the fry in her hand. "Unless you wanna get right to the crying and reassertion thing, we're gonna spend some time not being alone together."

Slowly, I unwrapped my hands from around my coffee. I didn't bother corrected her that it wasn't hot chocolate since that didn't seem quite as important as grabbing onto an errant fry prepared to jump ship off the edge of the plate and popping it into my mouth. There was a crisp crunch.

"Last week I thought you wanted to throw me in front of a bus," I accused, because it was still kind of surreal to be sitting and snacking with her like we were friends.

"The first step to creating a trusting and equal working environment is to be able to get along." She lowered both hands down to the table with her fingers entwined. "We don't need to be best friends," she assured me, which was a good thing. I didn't think either of us were ready to spend _too_ much time together or we'd backpedal. "But I think it might be helpful to know a little bit about each other. Avoid any more horrible disasters coming from not knowing quite enough."

I looked at her for a long moment, trying to divine if she was sincere enough. She lifted up her shoulders for the duration of the examination, as if asking nonverbally what I was thinking, and when I finally pursed my lips and slowly nodded, she relaxed, grinned, and violently bit off half of a fry. I let my mind drift in search of something to ask, figuring we could do something like Twenty Questions if she wanted to learn a little about me. Twenty Questions wasn't the kind of game where things got really deep, and Twenty Questions _was_ the kind of game that I _should_ have played with Angela and Hodgins when they wanted to.

After all, it's kind of ridiculous that I'm not even sure if my best friends know my favorite color, or favorite music, or that I actually always liked criminal justice, or that I used to want to be a lawyer before I grew up and realized that, one, people are stupid, and two, people are annoying, and soon thereafter came to the secondary realization that dead people are a lot less stressful in general.

My eyes planted themselves on the cooler underneath the register. "Do you like fruit or chocolate?" I asked, looking between the French silk pie and the cinnamon-apple pie that looked almost equally tantalizing underneath.

"Ooh." She followed my lead and looked in the direction I was. Saroyan sounded like I'd just asked her one of the hardest questions I could have possibly thought of. "My head says fruit but my tongue says chocolate."

I looked away from the pies to consider the health merits, but quickly dismissed it. Sugar content won't kill me, and besides, I've never been one who cared much about what was in what I ate anyway, as far as calories and sugars were concerned. I never really had the chance to overeat until I had long since learned to eat barely more than enough to healthily survive.

"By the time they've added all the sweeteners and preservatives, the fruit probably isn't much healthier," I commented helpfully, seeking out Joanne both with eyes and voice. _French silk it is, then._ "Hey, Joanne? About that tab…"

* * *

 **A/N: I know it's been another four months and I have no good reason for it.**

 **I know I keep saying that I'm finding my muse and getting serious about this, but... at this point I think it's just repetitive. So... I'm trying, but... we'll see how it actually ends up going. *shrugs but crosses fingers***


	17. The Blonde in the Game, Part One

Leaves crunched loudly underneath my boots and I heard a stick snap. One of my feet went into mud made by pooled rain water in a hook-shaped tree root above the earth. I grimaced and kept going, following the park ranger and staying to the right so that there was room for Brennan to come with me. She didn't seem as bothered by walking through the woods.

The ranger, dressed in his full uniform and complete with his hat, lifted up a piece of orange tape, both ends wrapped around a different tree. Several square units had been roughly blocked off for crime scene investigation teams. Booth, Brennan, and I were the first on the scene. He lifted his feet higher than any of the rest of us when he walked, and he had gloves on, so he could reach out and just move things away if they were too close to his face or torso.

"Hikers aren't supposed to let their dogs off the leash back here," he prefaced, almost yelling so that he could be clearly heard without stopping to turn around. "But I'm pretty sure the dog was running free when he found the… what he found," he lamely finished. The ranger had already loosely filled us in on what he'd discovered a little over an hour ago.

He held the orange tape up for us when we reached the cordoned section. There was still enough slack in it so it wasn't going to rip or come off of the trees. Brennan ducked down a couple of feet below her height to slip underneath and straightened up on the other side, taking white latex gloves out of her brown canvas bag to prepare.

"What's the condition of the body?" She asked. The anthropologist stretched out the rim of a glove a little bit, pushed her fingers inside, and forced it to stretch around her hand.

The ranger just shrugged. "No idea." I went next, and I annoyedly wondered what the hell he was using his eyes for. How do you report a dead body if you don't actually look at it to know it's there? "Can't get close enough to examine it," he elaborated.

Booth took the tape from him to hold it up for himself. The ranger put his hands on his belt. "Why not?" The agent asked, then bent into the crime scene.

The ranger made a displeased huff. "The dog is _definitely_ not on its leash at this time."

"That sounds foreboding," I grumbled. Dogs used to be my favorite animals, but I'm not a huge fan of them anymore since someone tried to use them to dispose of my body. Now when I see them I have to remember the savage pack with blood soaked into their fur, foaming at the mouths. I think I'm a cat person now.

After scaling up a short slope, we stood at a vantage point overlooking what could have been turned into a picnic clearing. There was an open space where large rocks sat and a slightly depressed area where there might have been a small stream into the larger creek several yards to our right, a long, long time ago. A big, angry-looking Rottweiler mutt had its front paws up on the highest boulder, its ears pinned back defensively while it growled around the bones in its mouth. It clutched an ulna and radius in its mouth at the point where the two bones were held together by sinew and muscle ligaments, and still attached by thick, fleshy tissue were the bones of the hand on one end of the arm bones.

A harried-looking man in short Capris and a polo seemed like he was just panicking. He kept calling for his dog, holding a leash in his hand. The collar was still on the dog, but I guess the owner had the sense not to get close enough to hook the leash to the D-ring while his pet was so protective of whatever remained of the corpse. The majority of the body was on the other side of the rock, and even the owner was staying pretty far back.

Booth winced. _"Ooh."_

The owner was a ginger-haired guy in his thirties, or maybe his late twenties if he looked older than he actually was. "Put _down_ the _bone!_ " He yelled at his dog, trying and failing to sound stern. He was way too freaked out. He made overexaggerated gestures with his hands as if the dog were going to learn those words on the spot.

Booth elbowed Brennan in her side and pointed down the slope to the animal. "Now, how the hell are we going to get to the body?" He asked expectantly.

I really didn't know what he wanted her to do about it. She's an anthropologist, not an animal trainer. Maybe it was because of her habits of getting snappy and urgent about preserving integrity of evidence. I involuntarily substituted a mental picture of Steve Irwin and a crocodile with Brennan and the dog and snorted to myself.

"Come on, Buddy, drop it!" The owner begged.

The ranger shook his head. "You don't see that every day," he commented mildly, slightly understating.

I nodded agreement. "That's what I imagine a hellhound would look like," I shared, pointing at the dog. Feigning far less care than I actually felt, as if I wasn't internally demanding what the hell to do, I indicated the bones it was guarding. "Bones of the damned in its mouth and everything."

The ranger shared my point of view, though gave me a slightly odd look. "I've sent for Animal Control," he promised us, then looked apologetically at Booth. "It'll take them another hour to get out here."

 _Another hour?_ Each time the dog changed how it held the bones, it created more marks on them with its teeth or destroyed particulate evidence. We couldn't risk key evidence being destroyed in the time it took the mutt to get moved away from the body.

The owner just now saw the federal agent in his nice, government-typical black suit. "Drop it, now!" He shouted at his dog, who surprised no one by failing to obey. He held out a hand towards Booth. "I – I'm so sorry," he fervently rambled. "He's never done anything like this!"

Booth didn't acknowledge the owner. It was probably better not to pay much attention to the guy whose dog was ruining Dr. Brennan's evidence – she's always very territorial of her forensic scenes. "You ever wanted a dog, guys?" He asked conversationally, eyeing the big Rottweiler breed.

"Not a huge Rottie fan," I grumbled, "And even more so now." The dog didn't just look like a supposedly scary breed – he looked actually _mean_ , like he would attack me if I got too close, and I'd had enough of that. "I prefer huskies."

"Mush, mush!" Booth joked, making me roll my eyes.

Brennan had her head tilted thoughtfully. "I always wanted a pig," she remembered.

Booth just made a face at her back. "A pig?" He repeated cynically, probably laughing internally about how his partner couldn't even be normal about what kind of pet she wanted.

"Yes." She sensed his tone and gave him a _look_. "Very smart," she informed him rebelliously. She was more tolerant of his attitudes toward Zach than she was of his attitudes towards pigs. "And despite the popular misconception, they're very clean." I wasn't too sure I bought that, but I'd defer to her. Brennan has an amazing memory when we've not suffered head trauma at the hands of murderous voodoo priests.

"Yeah," Booth only agreed sarcastically. His grin grew mischievous and he started to tease. "You know, I prefer my pigs with a little mint, a little honey glaze-"

She fixed him with an insulted glare. "Not funny!" She was still on her vegetarian kick.

While they argued about pigs, I looked back at the loose dog. His short, stumpy little tail was held out stiffly and his teeth were bared. Though it was very aggressive, I wondered if I could get close enough with the leash without being hurt, if I didn't make any moves to take the bone. Although, at that point, if we forced the bone away, we would end up damaging it any more. Those teeth looked sharp. No, the dog would have to voluntarily let go or be tranquilized, and since we couldn't wait for the people with the tranq guns, options were even more limited.

 _Maybe if it had something to distract it…_ Dogs can guard bodies for days on end. There are all sorts of stories about dogs who smell their owners, even after burial, and stay by their graves. There are even more about pets protecting their masters' dead bodies after strokes and heart attacks. They're territorial about meat and scents. It's an instinctive response. That said, dogs aren't always the brightest, and sometimes they can be persuaded.

While I was looking for a stick big enough to throw but small enough to handle easily, something small and tan skittered off the end of my boot. I impulsively hurried a couple steps back. "Oh, God, a lizard just crawled over my shoe," I loudly complained. "Not that I'm not enjoying this woodland excursion, but can we focus on getting rid of the demon dog?"

Brennan held her hands in front of her, but because she already had gloves on, she didn't put them in her pockets or cross them against her chest. "In some cultures, dogs can guard corpses, sometimes to the point of their own starvation, so…" She gave Booth a decisive nod. "Shoot it."

 _What?_ I did a double-take.

"I'm not shooting him for just doing what comes naturally!" Booth's hand flew to his holster and he moved a step away from Brennan. As a pet person, he would never shoot someone's dog if there were other means. And besides, I don't think the sickened, nervous moan from the mutt's owner helped. "As far as he's concerned, finders' keepers!"

The scientist gave him an unimpressed glower and turned her head to me. I moved my hand down to touch the cool metal of my own sidearm, which was held at my waist in a belt holster I had bought from a sporting goods store. After Cullen approved my application, I went through a couple evaluations at the bureau which were sped along by his push. After getting good marks in a shooting practical, proving good vision, and having to take a short assessment with one of their clinical psychologists, I was deemed physically and mentally fit.

But that would probably go away if I shot a dog, and besides, I didn't want to shoot it, either. Regardless of what it was doing, it was still a dog. Its brain wasn't complex enough to know better, and it wasn't right to kill someone's pet right in front of them. Pets are like family; humans or not, the attachments people form with them are strong.

"Yeah, don't look at me," I warned, shaking my head. Usually I was pretty complicit with what she wanted, but I had my limits. "Demonic or not, I'm not killing a dog unless it's rabid."

Her jaw dropped in surprise. "That dog is compromising the integrity of our remains!" She told me, raising her voice and pointing at it again for extra emphasis.

"Yes, but it's not doing it on _purpose_!"

"There _is_ another way, Bones," Booth interrupted soothingly. He smiled and rolled his shoulders back, fixing his blazer (which he hadn't yet noticed had gotten some tree sap dripped on the back of his arm). "Dogs love me."

Brennan's annoyance took a back seat while we both watched the agent trek down the short hill. He kept looking to his feet so he didn't trip or slide. The Rottweiler turned its big head towards him and the growls got quieter, though I think more of his teeth started to show.

"This won't end well…" I predicted with a sigh.

"Nice doggy," Booth crooned to the dog, moving closer to it. "Good pooch." He used a stupid baby voice while talking. _"Nice_ doggy!" I shook my head while Brennan watched in concern. The dog's growls had almost stopped, though its jaw being so tense and its tail and ears still in defensive positions were warning signs. " _Good_ pooch!"

My father slowly put an arm out, which was probably not something he should have done. As he inched closer, taking small, dragging steps, the dog lowered its head. It set the arm piece down none-too-gently on the rock, then lifted its head again. I saw it start to bare its teeth.

"Get back!" I yelled down at him. There was no reason for the dog to open its mouth again after going quiet unless it was going to bite.

The mutt lunged at Booth suddenly, snapping its jaws at him so loudly that I heard it from where I was still at the top of the clearing. It barked meanly, intermittently growling. Booth pulled himself away and backed up hurriedly. Once he was more than five feet away, the dog put its head down, picked up the bones again, and resumed its protective stance.

Booth scowled at it and took several more steps away, just to be safe. Then he established grumpily, "We're just going to wait for Animal Control."

Sometimes there was something endearing about it when he tried to help and then got his arm bitten off, but it wasn't quite so easy to sympathize when it was almost literal. Hodgins was far less predictable than a _dog_ , so he really should have seen that coming. His sulking just made him seem a little childish that he didn't get his way.

I looked down, intentionally checked for a lizard, and, finding none, picked up an acorn that had been at my feet. I decided it was too small, tossed it back down, and grabbed a pine cone instead.

I made a step closer to Brennan and held it out. "You take it," I offered distastefully. "With my luck, a horde of ants will come crawling out." Brennan wasn't as skittish of bugs as I was.

She took the pine cone with interest, whistled for the dog, and threw it across the clearing. The dog's ears pricked up slightly from its skull and it dropped the bones again, this time without even putting its head closer to the ground first. While Brennan objected to the rough treatment, the dog bounded off of the rock and chased the pine cone into the woods at the outskirts of the perimeter.

"Nice throw," I complimented, somewhat impressed that she'd made a lightweight object go so far. The owner scrambled to chase after the dog, nearly slipping and falling in the mud on the way.

We both walked down off the hill, the park ranger following behind us and scratching his head that it was so easy. Booth also seemed miffed. Brennan immediately took the dog's former place so he couldn't easily come running back up to the body and picked up the arm the dog had dropped. The bones in the wrist looked oddly configured now. They weren't particularly damaged, as far as I could see without a magnified view, but the already-decomposing ligaments which had been holding them together was even weaker after being shaken around.

"Okay, I need everybody to clear the area." She looked up and waved off the park rangers, one of whom had been staying aside since the dog was so aggressive. "Set up a perimeter." There was already a perimeter, but it was only established by park rangers. She needed it worked as a crime scene, which meant there needed to be a different tape, more watch to make sure civilians didn't wander in, and some form of gridding to mark off the exact location.

"Clear the area!" Booth cupped his hands around his mouth and waved around to the other rangers that had been securing the scene. "Let's set up a perimeter!"

I raised my eyebrows and knelt on the relatively smooth rock opposite Brennan's. "Is it just me, or is there an echo?" I asked her pointedly.

"Is there an echo?" Booth repeated after me, mimicking my intonation.

I forced a smile, still ignoring him. "Don't you just want to smack our echo in the face sometimes?" Wisely, there was no echo after that sentiment.

"He'll stop sooner if you stop responding," Brennan dryly advised, turning the bones carefully in her hand, trying to estimate how much damage the dog had caused. "His attention span is very short when he's not being engaged."

* * *

After we got transport back to the Jeffersonian, we laid out the crumpled body in anatomical order on the platform, turned on the light underneath it, and got to work. Zach studied the photos of the crime scene in the camera roll, comparing them on occasion to the body he could look up and see. Hodgins took very gentle scrapings and samples to test for chemical, biological, and entomological evidence. Cam did something similar, but with larger, fleshier parts, sending a sample of tissue near the chest cavity for a tox screen.

Brennan first looked at the skull. After she was done with that, she moved towards the middle of the body while I pulled on my gloves and started working at the wrists. We hadn't seen it right away on the hand the dog had chewed, but there were very thin pieces of some sort of twine or string that had dug into the flesh remains and between the bones during decomp. I was getting it out so Hodgins could analyze it and see what it was made of.

"The victim was female." Brennan announced after looking at the pelvic bones. Between those and the skull, sex was usually pretty easy to determine. "Late teens."

"Blonde," Cam added, noting the ratty, gross hair that remained. "The cause of death looks like blunt force trauma to the back of the skull." _Oh, you don't say?_ I almost asked. Sure, it was important to note, but it wasn't exactly science when there was an obvious crack in the head.

"She was buried facedown," Zach offered, walking closer and showing Brennan the photos. She looked at them for a second and nodded her agreement. During decomp, how the body lays changed as matter decays and gets all icky, and sometimes natural elements can change the positioning, too.

"What's that?" Cam asked, looking up from her stainless-steel tins, holding her bloodied gloves up carefully. "Some Satanic hoo-ha?"

"It's a potential clue for a software reenactment," I contradicted. Satanic murders had been debunked at some point, but I knew there was a first for everything, and besides that, Brennan wouldn't take a psychological study as actual evidence.

"My Uncle Preston wants to be buried standing up without a casket." Hodgins shared with a grin, looking around proudly. It was clearly one of those things were he mistakes 'weird' for 'cool'. When no one responded except for Cam and Booth, both giving him looks that clearly showed their thoughts on his odd uncle, Hodgins' buzz was killed. "Pupal casings and insect remains suggest she was buried out there seven to ten years ago."

"Seven to ten," I hummed. "She'd surprisingly well preserved. I wouldn't have expected there to be any flesh."

"You said she was by some rocks?" Cam asked. Booth and I both nodded in answer. "Huh. Maybe the rocks protected her from the elements and animals and they were just recently moved. Wasn't there a big storm last week?"

"Yeah, there are still places in the park where you can sink several inches down just by stepping in mud," I said, looking distractedly down at my boot unhappily. I'd wiped off as much as I could, but there were still reddish, clay-like remnants caked into the creases in the tread and on the edge.

"So what you're saying is that it's not a place for a romantic picnic," she summed lightheartedly.

"Not unless you're into getting your hands dirty," I returned, pointing down at the body with a wry smirk. Hodgins groaned at the bad joke – dirty from mud, figuratively dirty from murder – and I stuck my tongue out at him in response.

Since the tentative truce had been struck, things at the lab were going much more smoothly. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves more, and I felt a lot less threatened in the place I considered to be a sort of home. No one but me, Brennan, and Cam knew what had actually changed, but Booth was quietly pleased about it, so he knew he had something to do with it. As for the others, they'd spent several days getting progressively more tense and worried about the "inevitable" explosion before they finally realized that it had been averted. The pathologist and I had enjoyed watching it happen – their fidgeting had been amusing.

Brennan pointed out a part of the photo she and Zach were looking at. "The placement of the wrists and ankles suggest she was bound," she said, peering over at me and looking at the icky, moist, fraying string that I was working out. I frowned at it. _A binding. Yeah, I could see that._ It seemed to be strong enough.

"So much for my homemade bracelet theory," Angela sighed loudly so we heard, swiping her card on the control pad and climbing up the stairs to join us.

"Yeah," Hodgins sympathetically chuckled. "Sorry it didn't work out, Angie." He looked up after screwing a jar shut to make sure the contents stayed safe and unpolluted, and his eyes got wide. Angela was wearing coveralls, a definite step away from her normally casual but elegant fashion, and had curled her hair so it had more shape than usual. She wore golden bangles and a silver necklace, and she stayed far from the body on the examination table. "Wow, do _you_ look great today!"

Angela brightened with a flattered smile. She knew she was hot, she just liked getting compliments on it, and Hodgins was usually pretty sparing with his sincere compliments. "Thanks, Hodgie!" She replied. Her flirting came from over-the-top friendliness, and it made me a little bit uncomfortable. "This is my boho-rocker-artist, mid-week 'take a deep breath and pout' look."

Brennan made eye contact with me across the table. I silently lifted my shoulders. Neither of us had any clue what Angela's entire sentence meant.

"Hodgie?" Brennan asked instead, raising her eyebrows.

Booth snickered and made a kissy face at Hodgins to play. Everyone else was awkwardly quiet, and even the two being teased looked like they wished they hadn't forgotten they weren't alone. Angela looked down at her shoes and Hodgins cleared his throat.

"Um, residue on the medial malleolus might tell us what restraints were used," he suggested quietly, cowed.

That brought us back to the case. The restraints on the girl who was buried face down with her head bashed in. I shivered. I frequently had nightmares where I poured over the crime scene photos from a girl buried the exact same way, and remembered unearthing bodies from the same killer. It was uncannily similar.

"You said she was a blonde, didn't you?" I asked, hoping I'd be told that I had misheard. One more similarity would just make it way too creepy. I didn't need this case being added to my hypothetical what-ifs until we caught the killer.

"I did," Cam confirmed, dashing those hopes. "Why? Is that significant?"

 _I hope not._ "No, I'm being paranoid." I shrugged it off and looked back to the body, but the feeling of unease remained. _She was in her late teens, too…_

"You got your application approved, I see?" For the first time, Cam spotted the bulge of my brand-new, fully-sanctioned sidearm underneath my lab coat.

"Yes, I did." I stood up a little taller proudly. No more feeling unsafe for me. Whether it was corrupt cops or that weirdo stalker, Laurier, I wasn't going to be a hapless sheep anymore. "Thank you for noticing. I have all the necessary documentation and I made a photocopy of my license. I can have it on your desk before lunch, just in case you want that on hand."

Cam nodded. "I have a place to put it," she promised, also implying that she would be taking me up on that. I didn't think she assumed I was lying, and I could see how it might be important to be able to prove her gun-toting employee is totally allowed to have said gun. "Thanks for the consideration. Saves me the time of having to ask."

"Look at that," Brennan murmured, already focusing in on the body again.

Zach bent down beside her to look, as well. He squinted his eyes. "Wear to her right lateral epicondyle and rotator cuff," he analyzed. Brennan didn't correct him, so he knew he had identified it correctly. "Also, there appears to be repetitive motion damage to the lower lumbar vertebrae. I noticed it while we were arranging the spine."

"What's that mean?" Booth intervened, not content with waiting.

I bent over just slightly, enough to cause the kind of grinding that we could see in the skeleton and moved my shoulder in the corresponding way. The result was a really awkward sort of swinging my arm, but it kind of seemed… I straightened my elbow and did it again. This time I recognized the motion.

"Golf," Zach realized, also seeing it.

Angela held her tablet out on one of her forearms and operated it with her free dominant hand. The Bluetooth connection between it and one of the display monitors woke up and she drew up a computer-rendered image. It looked too perfect to be a real person – it was just a little bit too symmetrical and the skin was too even and clear. There weren't even pores. Angela had given her straight hair, which, as Cam had degreed, was blonde.

"I did a facial reconstruction, extrapolating skin tone from hair color." She looked up at the screen and sighed. "For the record? I hate the guy who killed this girl and I hope to hell he burns for all eternity."

Booth's entire countenance softened as he looked at the image, respectfully growing somber. "That's our victim?"

While Angela sorrowfully nodded at him, Hodgins held up a sample between the thin prongs of tweezers. "I found flecks of some type of black enamel in the wound," he reported out loud. "Could be from the murder weapon." He turned the tiny little chip over and looked at it in contrast with the solid color of his evidence tray.

Zach turned the skull very carefully a few degrees in one angle and he pulled the extendable lamp arm closer, shining it down on the skull to see the crack in the bone closer. "The shape suggests a tire iron," he decided slowly, looking up grimly. Even he shifted uneasily.

The tire iron was the final straw, and the part that got to everyone else (sans Cam). That was the signature murder weapon Howard Epps had used. None of us could look at them the same way after finding those bodies for ourselves.

I put my hands down on the edge of the table firmly and took a deep breath. "Oh, no."

"Tire iron…" Brennan repeated.

"Please don't," I objected. I knew it had to be talked about, even if it was only the slightest possibility, I just really didn't want to think about having to look the monster in the face again. Kenton had felt emotions. He'd abducted me out of fear. Epps just did it because he liked it. Because he got off on it.

"Tire iron," she repeated, looking at Booth. His expression dimmed and he moved away from the edge of the platform. "Hands and feet bound, buried _facedown."_

"Young, blonde," Hodgins added solemnly, putting down his evidence tray while he lost some color in his face.

Booth looked down. "Epps," he groaned.

My stomach turned. "Son of a bitch." I stripped my gloves off and threw them hard into the trash can, then claimed one of the unused chairs and sat down.

"Um… hello?" Cam stayed where she was while the rest of us became angry, horrified, and resentful, and any mix thereof. It must've been a scary transition to watch, as it came on so suddenly and seemed to change the atmosphere of the entire lab. "New team member in the room?"

My mouth didn't want to make the words, but I forced it to anyway. "Howard Epps is a psychopath, previously on death row." I explained, staring at the floor so I didn't have to look at anyone. I needed a minute to temper the loathing and disgust I was feeling so it didn't show on my face. I thought I'd never had to deal with him again… now he was back. "He was convicted for the murder of seventeen-year-old April Wright and has since been charged with two additional murders in similar parameters."

"We found two of them earlier this year." Hodgins left his gloves on, but he sat down hard in the chair at the other table by the microscope and set his elbows on his knees.

"The judge stayed the execution to try him on the new charges," Angela recounted bitterly.

"You saved his life," Cam commented. "Ironic." Her intrigue was palpable, but she was also sensitive to the fact that we were all very obviously disturbed.

Defeatedly, Brennan gestured at the body left lying on our table. "The time frame fits…" She must've been hoping that it wouldn't. If it didn't fit, then we could leave it alone and know that Epps couldn't be responsible. We could know we weren't going to have to go through this nightmare scenario again. "This girl would've been killed about six months before Epps went to prison."

Booth moved himself into action quickly. He was motivated by anger and determination. When he told Angela what to do, he was brisk and short. "Run her through the database," he ordered. "Get an ID." Far from caring about being bossed around, Angela just nodded her compliance and started to do that on her device.

"Why don't you just ask him?" Cam suggested, leaning back.

"Because when I say psychopath, I mean full-on, television drama, complete _freak_ who would rather spin us in circles and laugh than do anything to ease an additional sentencing." I told her hatefully. "If we show up and ask who it is, all he'll do is laugh and patronizingly tell us that it would be too easy to just give us her name."

Booth also shook his head. "I won't take Holly to go talk to him," he said firmly, putting his foot down. I would have objected if it were anyone else, but I really didn't want to see the sicko. I didn't want him to see me. I'd have trouble sleeping as it was. "The last time she saw Epps, it… it got violent."

Cam just looked at him like he had forgotten who he was or who we were. "You'll be there to protect her," she reminded him with a slightly ridiculing tone. They both knew damn well that I could protect myself and would resent any implication or statement that I needed someone else to do it for me.

I snickered, dryly amused. The only good thing that had come out of the original case was that I got to break him, just like how he tried to break me. Cam sent me a bewildered look for the inappropriate response.

"She's not the one who needs protecting," Booth chuckled darkly and fixed the misconception. "She broke his wrist."

"In several places, it turned out." I sat up taller. It felt like there was a pit in my stomach gnawing away at my guts. I hadn't just been someone he chose to victimize in his own special, twisted way. I had been someone who wouldn't let it happen. I had been someone who defended myself and struck back against him in a way that his other victims, the other girls, had never had the chance to. "It felt _really_ good."

 _If I can break him once, I can break him again._

* * *

The last time I'd seen Epps, he had been in his death row cell. Despite his last-minute pardon, he hadn't been moved out of the execution block yet. Now he was in a high-security D-block ward, where the prison kept the inmates that they considered most dangerous. Epps was inside along with several other offenders who had committed grave _mala in se_ crimes, often on a repeated basis, and although we didn't see his cell for ourselves, we saw on the map that he was as far from the exit as they could place him.

One of the wardens was vaguely recognizable as someone whom I'd seen before and I guessed we met briefly in the first go-round of this sick, disgusting game. He escorted us to a holding room. They had two types of rooms, I learned: visitation and holding. Holding rooms were for questioning and sometimes punishment in lieu of a solitary confinement cell. Visitation rooms were the more typical kind, with the glass partitions in a long row.

"Why don't we just go talk to him?" I asked again, crossing my arms. "If we suddenly show up then it's got a surprise factor. He'll _know_ something is up if he's escorted out into holding."

"You're not going down that block, Holly," Booth told me, uncharacteristically brisk. I uncrossed my arms and held them stiffly at my sides, unsure how to respond. "I'm not having you near those sickos."

Booth had always been protective of me – to an extent – but he'd been toning it down more and more as he realized I could handle myself. No matter what he thought about it being a paternal responsibility, I would be turning eighteen in the next month and would do whatever I pleased. The seriousness with which he took this particular issue shocked me not because he cared to keep me apart from those prisoners, but because the last time he'd been so short with me had been concerning McVicar.

Before I could counter that in some way that wouldn't make one or both of us more upset, the warden put his master keys up to a thick door and opened it. On the inside was a small, uncomfortably dark room with a one-way mirror in it, not too different from the interrogation room setup in the FBI although definitely less spacious and a little dirtier. Through the glass, we could see the interior of the holding room, which had plain black walls and was only lit by a single overhead light fixture. The light itself wasn't very clear, which meant most of the room was in shadows. As far as safety went, I couldn't say that it seemed like a fantastic plan.

Brennan and I went into the room with the mirror so that we could watch what was going on, while Booth – as previously agreed – followed the warden to be let into the interrogation room. Epps had very little allowed contact with the outside world. For a body fitting his victimology being discovered, Booth was an expected visitor. We didn't want to make him feel any more powerful than he already would by letting him see that Brennan was involved, as well. To cap it off, although I would face him down again if it came to that, I remembered how violated and stupid he made me feel with his eyes and his words, and I didn't like the way those things felt. I had come to realize in the time since that _no one_ had the right to make me feel violated like he did, and the fact that he didn't actually touch me didn't negate his torment.

Epps looked like a completely different person when he looked up to see Booth. His previously-scrawny body had filled out and gained weight on his bones so he looked like a moderately strong, average man. His hair was definitely longer now that he wasn't on death row (inmates were, for the most part, allowed to choose their own grooming habits), though it looked greasy and ragged. His expressions were what had changed the most – before, he had pretended to be an innocent lamb shoved into the slaughter. Now he knew that there was no point and had given up those pretenses. The result was an eerie, unsettling mimicry of a smile.

 _"_ _Agent Booth… what took you so long?"_

I dug my nails firmly into my other wrist. Epps' voice had floated around my nightmares a fair few times since, and even more so on nights when I struggled to feel safe enough to sleep. His mocking, sugary tone made me feel like a shiver went up my back. Even as grainy and unclear as it was through the poor-quality transmitter, it had the unmistakable, inhuman qualities he had demonstrated amply before.

 _"_ _And where did you leave our partners?"_ Epps added, giving a sidelong look towards the mirror. For just a second I thought he was looking right at Brennan and knew exactly where we were. After my mild heart palpitation, I saw that he wasn't actually looking at her, but rather very near her, and had no way of knowing anything for sure unless Booth gave it away.

"Be careful," I mumbled under my breath, re-crossing my arms and hugging myself. "Psychopaths are the best profilers."

Booth may not have known what his tells were or what subtle micro-expressions to keep in check, but he did know when he was being baited, and he refused to bite. Instead of offering a response, he completely ignored the questions, striding confidently but with an air of boredom to the table and sitting down across from Epps.

 _"_ _What's this?"_ He asked, making a face of confusion. Less than three seconds later, I heard literal chains being yanked, and Epps was pulled forward, almost getting his face slammed into the table by his manacles being tugged. _"Oh! That's right."_ In that instant, if someone told me that smug insolence was a hereditary trait, I would have known that I got mine from Booth. _"You're chained."_

Epps pulled himself to sit up again, visibly chagrined and annoyed. His hawk-like eyes sharpened and he worked his jaw tersely. _"How about removing these shackles?"_

 _"_ _The name, Howie."_ Booth had always used that for Epps because the man hated it. It got under his skin, and Booth loved getting under skin. He started into the murderer's eyes in a complete deadpan. _"The name."_

There wasn't a question of _if_ Epps knew what he was referring to. Although he'd probably never admit he didn't know something, he would at least stay on topic, prodding for enough to glean what he needed to know. In this case, he went entirely irrelevant, looking down at his hands and raising his manacled forearms up closer to his chest.

He mused to Booth with a derisive snort, _"You know, those hack doctors at the prison infirmary, they did a miserable job setting my wrist."_ I felt a long twinge of satisfaction. He did a miserable job at being a person, so it was fair. _"It aches all the time, and I don't have a full range of motion."_

Nothing he had said so far actually made me _regret_ breaking his wrist. It hadn't been a purely defensive action. Motivated by spite and anger and internalized disappointment, I had provoked him into doing something that could be loosely called battery and I'd seized the opportunity to hurt him the way he had hurt April and her family, and Brennan, and Booth, and myself, and the defense lawyer he'd dragged along on a string.

Sure, it wasn't something I was too proud of. That didn't make it something I would regret. Things aren't black and white, so I won't pretend to be a pure little angel.

 _"_ _And let me tell you,"_ Epps continued, sounding like he was trying to force some detached, inappropriate companionship, _"When you're stuck in a prison cell for twenty-three hours a day, there's really only one thing you can do to pass the time… and I need my wrist."_

I would never admit that it took me until Booth replied to realize the activity he was referring to, although it wouldn't be any surprise that I was sure my face was revolted afterwards. Do what you want with your own body, but I don't want to hear it – especially not from a pervert that gets off on rape and murder.

 _"_ _Well, hey, I'm sure Miss Kirkland would be delighted to re-break it for you, if that's what you're asking."_ Booth conversationally promised, knowing he was right, and he took up a file folder from his lap, dropping it on the table. Epps could look at it but he couldn't read a nonexistent label, and he couldn't open it with both of his hands restrained.

"I'd love to give it a try," Brennan muttered. "I know ways to break a bone using nothing but a vice hold. I've never wanted to use them before, but he…" She seemed so frustrated that this one asshole was able to change the way she thought and felt.

"Yeah, I get it," I agreed wholeheartedly. "You don't need to explain."

 _"_ _What's that?"_ Epps finally caved and asked about the file after Booth made it obvious that he wasn't going to continue typing without some sort of cooperation.

 _"_ _What, these?"_ Booth lifted part of the file and intentionally left it angled up when he opened it so that Epps couldn't see what was inside. In truth, it was an empty file folder, but because the only reflective source in the room was in the wrong position to give it away, if Booth played his cards right, he could use it to win. _"These are crime scene photos. The ones you_ _ **like.**_ _Tell you what, if you tell me the girl's name, I'll let you take a look."_

His voice was mocking and disgusted, but regardless of his tone, his words would have an impact. Epps didn't bother to disguise his chagrin as his own impulses overwhelmed his dislike for Booth, which he had never made secret once it was clear he had been manipulating the agent.

The killer leaned forward a little bit, enough so that he could talk with that malignant glare in his eyes directed right into Booth's soul. _"Everything you need to win the game is right there in front of you."_ His promise sounded smooth and rehearsed. Just as I'd thought he couldn't seem any more like a snake…

 _"_ _Game?"_ Booth repeated, closing up the file and denying Epps the chance to see he'd been bluffing or to see the photos. Booth would never do that to a victim or their loved ones. To disrespect their integrity that way would disgust him. After all, not only is it awful, but he practices a religion where bodily presentation after death is symbolically important to the goodness of their afterlife. _"You're bored, aren't you?"_ He accused. _"Are you playing us?"_

A big part of me wanted to scream that _of course_ Epps was playing us, who else would he play, what else would he gain? He wasn't racing a clock anymore, just biding time until seven-year-old cases were finally put on the dockets. It was almost larger than the part of my brain that reminded me Booth knew what he was doing, and he had his own games he liked to play.

Epps leaned back slowly. His back was still slightly slumped, which was easily visible with the orange jumpsuit he had to wear, which did little to hide much of his shape or posture. _"When Dr. Brennan figures it out, come and see me again."_ His dismissal made Booth snort and he deliberately waved the folder as he stood up, reminding Epps what he didn't get to have. Brennan shifted her legs unhappily, though her eyes, locked on him through the window, were stormy. _"And next time, bring the little blonde girl,"_ he added condescendingly. _"Otherwise, I don't say a word."_

I self-consciously touched my hair. Ever since Epps fixated on me for my blonde-dyed hair, I had refused to be blonde again. I chose a color similar to my natural roots and re-dyed my hair black. I rubbed the strands between my fingers and wondered what Epps would say if he were to see. Probably nothing nice. I'd be refusing to feed into a fantasy, and I would be popping several of his bubbles by showing that I actually had never been blonde to begin with.

Booth slammed a hand on the table as he got up and put his hand aggressively on the buzzer by the door. The warden opened it less than five seconds later to let him out. Booth, as a final note, brandished the empty file at Epps threateningly.

 _"_ _Next time you see either of them,"_ he vowed loathingly, _"They'll be behind the screen while you're getting a lethal injection."_

* * *

Booth explained everything that had happened to us when we were back at the Jeffersonian. Cam and Hodgins had both gone through their jobs, leaving Brennan, Zach, and I to take another, closer look at all of the now-clean bones, catalogue them, and eventually store them in the bone room for safe keeping.

While Brennan took the right side of the body, Zach and I took the left, starting on different ends and working towards each other. The clipboard was on a rolling table which no one was using, but we positioned it between us so we could both grab it if we needed to note an anomaly or an injury to the bone.

Nothing Booth said was surprising, though some of it wasn't what I could have said. Having been right across from the bastard, I was sure Epps' creep factor was at least fifty percent stronger for Booth. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I may not have a choice about talking to Epps. He really didn't care about his victims or any of the rest of us, even though he may be spiteful if he failed to push our buttons. What was more important was information, and a very strong case against him. I was rooting for another death sentence.

The FBI agent finished his recount with disgust, seriously paraphrasing the serial killer's final request to see me. He mocked the wicked witch's voice from the old _Wizard of Oz_ movie and said, "Don't forget the little blonde, too." He sneered and returned to his normal voice. "Then he just didn't even fire a shot back at me. It was like he didn't care. I thought guys like these were supposed to have egos so big they couldn't let anything fit past them."

"Narcissism doesn't always manifest the way we expect it to," I cautioned him. "It's there. In fact, you probably fed into it by showing you feel so strongly about him that you envision the details of his death scene."

"Classic game theory," Zach stated, shaking his head slightly and making a mark on the clipboard. I moved up along the metatarsals on my end. They were strong and healthy and uninjured, so it was a faster process than Zach's, as he had started on the skull. "The throwing down of the gauntlet."

It was unusual that Zach spoke in metaphors, so even if Booth were particularly good with sophisticated metaphors, he probably still would've been confused. "What?" He asked, exasperated just because he already didn't know what the intern was saying.

Zach glanced at him and elaborated, seeming to remember Hodgins' rule that you had to at least double your words when speaking to "government employees" (when he said that, he really meant Booth). "A conflict of interest arises, followed by a series of moves from which divergent strategies can be discerned."

Booth shook his head and pointed at Zach like he was a weird spectacle. "What did he say?"

I translated with a small sigh. I had long since accepted the role when I had thought it was funny, and now I was saddled with it. "Epps is manipulating us," I rephrased clearly. "Throwing the gauntlet is a challenge, which he issued to you. Conflict of interest is a problem, which is the body. Series of moves, blah, blah – that's how our investigation proceeds. Divergent strategies are different means of handling the situation."

"Yes, I know," Booth turned back to Zach to impatiently scold. "I just said that."

"Zero sum, obviously," Zach acknowledged, looking across to Brennan thoughtfully. "After a few moves we'll know Epps' order of preference."

"As if we don't already," she commented somberly, both agreeing with Zach and pointing out that we already knew why Epps was playing. He was bored, he detested her, he had a _thing_ about me, and he likes to watch pain and fear.

Booth sighed pointedly. I looked up, stared across at the storage wall, and performed another service. "Order of preference: how he wants it to go. We'll figure out the end game he's gunning for."

My father threw his arms up and paced. "I already _know_ what he wants! I _told_ you." He stopped and put one hand tensely on his belt, and with the other, he pointed at me semi-aggressively. "He wants blonde-haired Holly sitting on the other side of the table, within touching and traumatizing distance!"

"That's not a long-term goal," I corrected. "And he's demonstrated that he's capable of indulging short plays for the sake of the longer one. Remember how he played before? All that wasted time on appeals, just to hook Amy Morton, just to get to you."

"Long-term, short-term, what's it matter?" He groaned. "I just want the weasel kept in his corner. With a barbed wire fence," he added bitingly.

Brennan looked up and rested the backs of her hands on the table, keeping the gloves she was wearing clean to touch the bones by leaving the palms and fingers up. "There are four rational players," she summarized. "Me, Booth, Holly, and Epps. I'm the expert who interprets, Booth is the agent who facilitates the interactions, Holly is clearly some objective fantasy…" Her face twisted in discomfort while she said that and I made an admittedly exaggerated shudder. "… And he sees himself as his own anti-hero." She tipped her head slightly the way she did when she realized something. "What about the non-deliberative agent?"

I raised my eyebrows and looked down. There wasn't really anyone we knew of so far, but then, we had only just confirmed that Epps was involved.

"What did she say?" Booth asked, this time just so annoyed with having to keep requesting clarification that the question was broadened to anyone who would answer.

Unfortunately, Zach took it upon himself to answer first. "In a game, there tends to be one N rational players and a nonconscious, non-deliberative agent," he explained helpfully.

I intervened before Booth had to say something. "Someone who plays a key role in the game without being aware," I explicated, meeting the agent's eyes over Zach's shoulder. "And because he doesn't have a conscious role, he is expendable, like a patsy. It could be anyone aside from the four of us, but it's most likely someone who isn't on our side. He sees his opponents as key players; his non-deliberative agent will be more like a pawn to him."

Zach turned to give all of his attention to Booth. "What did Epps talk about before he said that all the information you needed was in front of you?"

Booth rolled his eyes, but when Zach asks questions about cases, he's pretty good at answering them. "Mom, Bones, blondes, his wrist being set badly after Uma Thurman here broke it." At the gesture to me, I smiled proudly. His comment didn't exactly sound like it rang with pride, but I was not going to let that take away from my personal satisfaction. "And, um…" Uncomfortably, Booth grimaced. "You know, he made the point that he… _really…_ needed his wrist."

Zach's blank face and Booth's increasingly awkward one were hilarious to watch together. I had started making a list in my head of all the different expressions I could use in reference to male masturbation in case Zach needed a little less subtlety to get it, but given that Booth was there and Hodgins probably never would've let me hear the end of it, it was likely a good thing that Zach turned out not to need that "nudge" (more like shove).

His sweet brown eyes widened. "Chronic masturbation. The game may be all about self-gratification."

It didn't sound too unlike him. "He's a manipulative bastard," I reminded as a warning. No matter how crude or silly it seemed, Epps didn't do anything without purpose. "His use of _that_ to indicate his point isn't exactly classy, but it's probably intentional, to convey that none of the clues are sophisticated."

On one hand, it didn't seem in line with his ego. Wouldn't a man like Epps want to showcase his intelligence in every way possible? On the other, it made perfect sense. What was the point in dropping hints if no one would be able to understand them?

"He said everything we needed was "right in front of" us," I loosely quoted. "If it wasn't something he said, it must be something that is actually right in front of us."

" _Right_ in front of us," Brennan repeated with emphasis, her eyes drawing down to the examination table.

"Yes," Booth confirmed.

"The blonde is right in front of us," Zach noticed.

"And she has a wrist," Brennan added. She moved away from the section she had been working on and walked down towards the wrists on her side. "Well, two, in fact."

Brennan pulled the mounted magnifier over the wrist to have it on hand if she wanted it. The wrist is actually comprised of several small bones, so it wasn't as simple as knowing exactly which one to pick up and study. Zach did the same on our side, although since he had beaten me to it, I left him to do it himself. There wasn't really enough room or substance for two people to be working that same small area.

"If you had a pet pig, what would you name him?" Booth asked randomly.

Brennan looked up from the bones for a few seconds and decided, "Jasper."

"Oh." Going by Booth's expression, that did not strike him as a suitable name for a pig. "What about you, kid?"

"I wouldn't want a pig," I admitted. "A cat, maybe. I'd probably call it Cat."

"Wow," he responded dryly, underwhelmed. "Creative. You have to tell me how you came up with that."

"This wrist looks completely normal," Zach reported, frustrated.

He had barely finished speaking before Brennan piped up, dragging her magnifying glass closer. "Here, the right hamate bone." She moved the small bone in question to a less busy part of the table and stretched across to pick out the same bone from the other hand.

 _Hamate?_ Booth mouthed at me, protesting silently that it sounded like a made-up word. In reply, I held up my right hand, fingers splayed, and showed him where it was. When I touched my hand, I could almost feel the little depressions between hard bone where they weren't all connected.

"The whole coloration is off," Zach noted discontentedly, comparing the two hamates side by side. "It's slightly greasy compared to the rest of the surrounding bones."

Brennan, looking at them closely next to each other through her magnifier, held the side of her finger against them both to make them level. "It's about an eighth of an inch bigger than the same bone on the other side," she suspiciously estimated.

My hand raised to cover my mouth. There was a degree of variation allowed in bones, but it was very slight, and if the sizes were really that far apart…

"This hamate bone does not belong with these remains," Zach concluded, slowly rising his eyes up to Brennan's in alarm.

"It belongs with a second _body,"_ she agreed, drawing the second conclusion from the evidence. "There's another victim out there somewhere."

 _Not again._ We were unearthing more victims when it was supposed to be over. Talk about patience – waiting more than seven years for a body to be found, that was nuts. Biding his time, twiddling his thumbs, working out how he could twist us around to meet his ends... again, I felt like Epps was some sort of puppeteer, and more than anything, I wanted my strings cut.

"Round one goes to Howard Epps." Zach said after a moment of abhorred silence, all of us slipping back down into the rabbit hole of the last investigation.

Booth turned on him so quickly I thought he was about to chomp the intern's head off. "Why?" He demanded sharply, almost offended that the student was so quick to mark a point on Epps' side of the scoreboard.

"Because now he gets to have what he wants," I answered hollowly, a wince finding its way to my face before I could control it. "Me, in… touching and traumatizing distance," I repeated after Booth, going for a dark kind of humor but missing the mark.

Immediately, he objected. "No," he flatly denied, putting his hand out on the table and shaking his head firmly. If he thought that just because he didn't like it, the situation would change, then he was about to get a wake-up call. "You _definitely_ do not have to do that. You know, no one would blame you for feeling unsafe-"

I knew he was trying to give me a way out, but although it was well-intentioned and probably a smart option, I also knew that I could never forgive myself if I took it. "I would!" I interjected, stopping him before he kept going and made his case about how it wasn't my responsibility, and Epps didn't deserve a reward.

I took a deep breath and forced out a casual shrug in my shoulders. Life sucked, but I had committed to this. Epps was playing all of this now with me in mind. Not only would I feel like a coward if I backed down, abandoning my adopted family to the monster's mind ploys; it would change what he did and how he reacted. It might send Epps into a tantrum and cost my team information. There was more than just myself to consider.

"I would," I repeated, lifting my eyes to look at Booth again. He looked so upset, torn between being protective and being practical. "When he got off of death row, I made myself feel better by saying that he'd be back on it soon enough." But even if that happened, even if Epps died – there were victims unaccounted for. There were lives stolen away that he wasn't being held accountable for, and loved ones that had been ripped from families and friends, like Brennan's parents had been taken from her. "But that's not enough to make me feel better anymore."


	18. The Blonde in the Game, Part Two

Epps didn't know that we had visited the first time, I hoped. It was possible that he did, but even if that were the case, he had still been frustrated by not actually getting to see us. For a sadist like him, there was no point in causing pain or grief if he wasn't able to actually watch how people responded.

This time was going to be different. Like before, Booth and I both had to check our firearms at the door, and we all received visitors' tags. The guards, instead of detouring to D-block, led us right towards the visitation room for their dangerous criminals. It was the same one that Booth had used before. The guard unlocked the door to the viewing room and opened it up to let us inside.

Epps was across the table, chained down like before, from a short, petite, and mousy-haired woman I hadn't seen before. "Their visit is concluding," the guard informed, nodding briefly towards the one-way mirror. "You can talk to him whenever after she leaves. Give us a buzz when you're done."

 _Who would want to visit Epps?_ Even we were here under protest. Morally, we had no choice. The woman inside the room didn't touch him, but her arms were postured like she wanted to reach across the table. She didn't look much like him, and was far too young to be his mother, anyway. As far as I knew, Epps didn't have much of a relationship with any of his family, which had been small to begin with.

Brennan was making a judgmental face, but still appeared in her voice to be attempting to hold back her judgments. "Who's that?" Whether it was curiosity or concern, the disapproval was there.

Epps had on this disgustingly fake smile, like he'd worn on his manipulative face for all of us before we knew for a fact that he was the monster he was accused of being. "Whoever she is, she doesn't know what _he_ is," I deduced, crossing my arms. It was irresponsible and dangerous to let someone talk to him while unaware of what he'd done. Next thing you know, she's probably been given misinformation, or tricked into getting close enough to hurt. I wouldn't put it past him.

"Oh… _that,"_ Booth pointed to the brunette in the mirror while wincing. "Is Caroline Epps."

Brennan and I both widened our eyes. I threw a sidelong glance at Booth. He knew who she was already, which meant that he had either met her or seen her file in relation to Epps. I had seen every photo and every word in his file, and I may not remember every word perfectly, but I have a knack for remembering faces.

"Howard's sister?" Brennan assumed in surprise.

"Uh, no." Booth avoided our eyes. "His wife."

Neither of us said anything for a moment. It was hard to comprehend why _anyone_ would marry a man like the one in those chains. Even if they'd been together before his arrest, and subsequent conviction, and more recently added charges, I couldn't imagine anyone not divorcing his sorry ass. I could see it if maybe they'd been together long before April Wright was killed, but the fact was that they hadn't, and even so, the Jeffersonian was arguably the most respected forensic lab in the country. Us saying that he had definitely killed the three victims we've found should've been pretty damn convincing.

Brennan couldn't say anything purely because she was so shocked. She'd taken a step back and balked, staring with revile at the couple through the glass and apparently questioning general humanity again.

"Well, that part is new," I remarked mildly, unable to think of what else to say.

Booth nodded and took a small sidestep away from Brennan, who still looked positively repulsed. "They were married about four months ago."

"Why?" I asked, finding my voice again. When did they have time to establish trust and love when Epps had been single at the beginning of the year and in prison for every single day in between? "Was she threatened into it?"

Caroline brushed her hair back behind her ears after smiling sweetly at something that Epps said. It was kind of sad, truly, how convincing he could be. Had it not been for his rap sheet and his residence, he could've been very charming. He had the looks for it and he knew how to mimic charisma. She picked up her phone, preparing to leave.

"Could you keep your voice down, please?" Booth complained to Brennan, hushed, and gestured out the door to leave the observation room. "Heads up, it's our turn to visit the psychotic murderous maniac-" He cut himself off as soon as Brennan had turned the handle and pulled open the door.

She, however, did not see any reason to leave the message unsaid, and she completed it even as the other door opened for the newly-married wife. "Bastard," Brennan stated factually.

Booth plastered on a bright, enthusiastic smile while I moved out of the way and surveyed Caroline skeptically. She had on a lavender skirt that looked like it was sewn in the nineties and a long-sleeved woolen sweater. The wool was kind of thready and worn, and her hair kept catching and frizzing on the material. In the brighter light, I had expected her to gain more color, but she looked just as pallid as she had in the room. I was pale myself, but where I just looked like I had never seen the sun before, she seemed almost sickly, despite otherwise appearing healthy.

"Hi, Mrs. Epps, I'm Special Agent Seeley Booth." Booth beamed and held his hand out. Caroline, although surprised that there were other visitors, amicably shook hands, and the agent used his other arm to gesture to us. "This is Dr. Brennan, and this is Miss Kirkland."

"Oh, Agent Booth…" Caroline murmured all of our names under her breath while she shook hands with Brennan, who allowed it reluctantly but didn't stop looking at her oddly. She offered a hand to me, but I just shook my head and pushed my hands in my pockets. Her expression was a little embarrassed, but I wasn't going to learn to expand my comfort zones with the wife of a serial killer who enjoyed fucking with my head. She got over it and smoothed her sweater down, smiling kindly. "Howard told me that you all worked to save his life last year."

"It was our pleasure," Booth lied through his teeth, still with that infuriatingly friendly demeanor.

"Speak for yourself!" I snorted.

"I was disappointed," Brennan objected honestly, crossing her arms. We did not want to be associated with Epps as allies of any kind.

Caroline looked at us without any frustration, but she wasn't happy, either. "Extending Howard's life has given him time to come to grips with what he's done," she appealed, her big eyes wide and earnest. I raised a single eyebrow. _Funnily enough, his feelings are not what I'm concerned with._ "To ask God for forgiveness."

Religion was usually a minefield for me. I tended to ignore it because I didn't often understand the sentiments, but there was no way I could let that slide. I fixed my eyes on her incredulously. "What kind of God would forgive him for the senseless rapes and murders he committed just because he says he's sorry enough times?" I demanded without raising my voice. I wanted her to actually _think_ about what I said, not just feel like she was being scolded. "Do you think _praying_ is going to give those girls back their lives, give their families back their daughters and sisters?" Anyone saying that Epps deserved to live just sounded to me like they thought it was fair for his victims to die. "And please, don't answer that with a remark about how the first step to forgiveness is repentance," I added as a warning, because I knew Epps didn't feel any such thing.

Caroline stared back at me, firm and slightly offended. Maybe I had been off with my perception of religion, but I was of the understanding that there were good and bad people, and the good were rewarded while the bad went to hell. By that fundamental belief, there had to be bad people, and Epps certainly wasn't one of the good ones.

"Howard _repents_ ," she said, choosing her word with emphasis while locking her eyes with mine challengingly. "And regrets what he did every day." I made a dry face at her; _I'm sure he says he does._ "I can't _begin_ to imagine the tragedy that those families suffered, but that was before. He's changed, I know it."

That sounded like the same idea someone hears from an abuse victim: they were wrong, and they're sorry, and they're different now so I'm safe. And then, almost inevitably, there would come a time when they _weren't_ safe.

"Are you on some kind of medication?" Brennan inquired. She thought it was a genuine question, and her usually very open and straightforward facial expressions were offering concern and cynicism.

Caroline huffed, even more insulted than she had been before. Booth shook his head and covered his eyes with one hand like a visor. "I should've known this would go like a train wreck," he grumbled to himself.

"Dr. Brennan," Epps' wife started haltingly, glaring at Brennan angrily for not listening. "I'm _not_ one of those crazy women who falls in love with death row killers."

I blinked and raised a hand to point. "Um, excuse you, but that guy through there?" I prodded my finger towards the door she had just come out of. "Death row killer."

"She's right," my mentor quickly agreed in my defense when I became the recipient of the glare. "I don't see how a sane person could fall in love with him, so clearly that's exactly what you are."

Booth stretched an arm out behind the infuriated brunette, who was breathing deeply to try to keep her cool. He ushered her past myself and my roommate respectfully, getting her several feet away before moving his arm and reaching into his coat. "Listen," he said diplomatically, taking out a contact card. "If the prison ever gives you a hard time in coming to see your husband, just give me a call." He smiled politely while she took the cardstock with a relieved smile. "I might be able to help."

"Thank you, Agent Booth," she responded, making a point of putting the card alongside her ID card in her phone case.

"Are you serious?" Brennan hissed at him while he came back. "She's _crazy!"_ It seemed like Booth was enabling someone of poor judgment to make reckless decisions. He might as well have invited someone suicidal to take a nice, long walk across a high bridge.

Caroline threw another sour look back down the hall at Brennan. Booth clapped his hands to urge the anthropologist to move into the visiting room instead of continuing to upset the civilian. "Chop-chop, let's go." For good measure, he said another kindly-meant goodbye to the woman before she left, which she returned while deliberately ignoring me.

"Why were you nice to her?" Brennan hissed at him, aggrieved. She didn't like to waste any time treating people a way that they didn't deserve, and anyone capable of assenting to marriage should be capable of being confronted with facts. She married a murderer, and no amount of religious lip service is going to make him less guilty.

Booth snapped back, very quietly so that Caroline had no chance of hearing. "Because _we_ might _need_ her." The strategy was sound for getting information, but it probably wasn't worth it.

I muttered, "Thinking that someone could fall in love with a monster like Epps is _almost_ as freaky as being in the same room as Epps." It made my skin crawl. Some people just don't deserve a significant other, and some others should apparently not be trusted to choose their own significant others if they're going to choose sadistic psychopaths.

Brennan almost opened the door, but Booth insisted on going inside first. They briefly argued over where she was going to be. Booth didn't want more of his partners in Epps' sights than strictly necessary, and although she objected, he got her to grudgingly agree when he mentioned that refraining from having her in the room could give us leverage for a future meeting. The scientist returned to the observation room while I followed behind Booth, bracing myself for what came next. I would never be _ready_ to see Epps again, but I was as close as I would ever be. He was a monster, but so was Kenton, and so was McVicar, and I had survived those so I would sure as hell survive this one.

"Ah!" The little, pleased exclamation rang with saccharine excitement, mocking us. Epps let his mask slip, peeling off like a sunburn. "You came." Even his smile altered, quickly transitioning from one of fondness and friendship to a manipulative, dark, superior smirk. "I knew you would."

 _That sounds like him, alright… always has to be the smartest in the room._

I had no patience for feeding into his ego or beating around the bush. This game was Epps' only source of entertainment. Now that it had been put into motion, he wouldn't be content with letting us leave without clues because we'd be put at a stalemate. I had no reason to waste any more of my life in this depressing cage than I had to.

Neither of us sat down right away. We knew better than to let this feel too much like a compromise. "Dr. Brennan found the message in the hamate," I stated coldly, keeping the emotion out of my tone. "She's analyzing the wrist bone as we speak," I lied. Technically, Zach was the one doing that.

Epps kept his smirk as he looked over me. He had never seen me in anything but baggier, oversized clothes before, and nowadays I wore things that fit the way nice clothes were supposed to. I wasn't fully comfortable with it, but I liked the way that they looked. I liked feeling like I had the money and social standing to dress better. His eyes stared at the curves of fabric on my thighs and hips, then up higher.

"We just met your wife," Booth said, clearly having thoughts about this himself now that Caroline wasn't hear to be all huffy and pissy about our opinions. He snapped his fingers irately to get Epps' attention off of me. "She's very nice."

I didn't _like_ being stared at by a known rapist, but I had known to expect that it was coming. It had happened last time, too. The only way I could win, short of leaving the room, was to pretend that his attention didn't bother me. And oh, _God_ , it bothered me, but I was pretty good at concealing that when I wanted to.

Epps didn't even look over at the FBI agent. He was totally uninterested in Booth now that he had what he wanted. "Caroline's a hairdresser," he stated, and I inwardly wondered why the hell her hair looked so dry and shapeless if she was supposed to manage hair for a living. His words were totally dismissive and rude. "I'm so glad you came," he told me, looking up to my face to make eye contact, hoping I would squirm. "I do hope you come back after you find what's hidden on the bone… what've you done to your hair?"

His smug satisfaction faded as he realized that the prize he'd been so eager for – me, with my blonde hair and insecurities and anger – weren't what he was actually getting. I had changed a lot since then, and ironically, he owed a part of that to himself. As well as enjoying the physical turn-on of blondes, Epps had taken a personal pleasure in picking out things I felt badly about and reminding me that I had no real place alongside Booth or Brennan.

"I was a bottle blonde." I told him with a little more vindictiveness than necessary. He had tried taking my happiness from me before, so I would just ruin his fantasy now.

"It looked gorgeous." He glared at me for changing it, almost threatening with how predatory he seemed, even while chained down to a table in a super-max prison.

Emboldened by this power I suddenly realized that I had, I pulled out one of the two chairs on our side of the table and swung it out to straddle it backwards. I wasn't too close to the table, but I was symbolically at his level, and physically closer.

"If you touch me, I will not stop at your wrist," I warned seriously. I had every intention of following through. I would probably try to break him a little higher up to see if I could shatter more than one bone at once. Human hands are really very dexterous and complicated. "You can't come at me the way you did last time." I leaned in a little, putting my head over the table with a confident smirk to replace the one he'd lost, glowering at me loathingly. "I don't look like the kind of girl who gets you all hot and bothered anymore, do I?"

During my taunting, Booth took out the other seat and used the furniture normally. I lowered my voice while I spoke to make it even more personal. My tone might have been closer to seductive if I hadn't been intentionally tearing apart the impressions Epps had taken away from our last meeting. I figured the more I seemed like something he couldn't touch, couldn't have, the more it would piss him off.

And the best part was, everything I was saying was true. I _wasn't_ the same as I had been before. I still had my insecurities, and I still had times when I second-guessed myself, but the specific ones that Epps had picked up on had been taken care of in the time since. Those chinks in my armor had sealed, and I doubted he'd have an easier time finding more with what little he'd be permitted to see.

Underneath the table, a hand touched my right leg. It crossed my mind to raise my knee quickly and slam the hand up into the bottom of the table, but I realized both of Epps' arms were visible. It was Booth, lightly touching my thigh. He would play along and trust me to know what I was doing, but he didn't like it. He wasn't comfortable with me putting myself in this position, he never had been, but the extra lengths I was taking just to get under the killer's skin were putting him on edge.

I got all this just from the fact that he was the one who touched me, instead of vice versa. We had had an unspoken agreement for our entire relationship that touching would be allowed, but only if _I_ instigated it, with the exception of extenuating circumstances. For this to be an extenuating circumstance, maybe I was going further than necessary.

"You really don't," Booth agreed. I leaned back a little, eyes still on Epps to make sure he didn't try anything. My father moved his hand when I had put a little more distance, both physical and other, between myself and the bastard. "Not young, not blonde-"

"Not dead," I interrupted bluntly. "Is that why you buried them facedown?" I asked scornfully. "Because you were too cowardly to look at their faces?"

Booth sighed, rolled his eyes, and muttered, "Kid, do yourself a favor and shut up. You're taking a lot of liberties."

I had never been seriously told to shut up by anyone on my team before. No one had ever treated me with anything less than respect, sans when we were fighting and tempers were understandably high. But this was unprompted, and undermining, and humiliating, and it was done _right in front of Epps,_ with absolutely no reason or regard whatsoever, and for a second I seriously wanted to go back to that thought where I crushed that hand into the table.

 _"_ _Excuse you?!"_ I demanded, turning my head to Booth confrontationally. That was bullshit. I was _not_ taking that, not in front of Epps, not _ever_. Doing _myself_ a favor? Taking _liberties?_ By doing _what,_ mocking the serial killer?! Booth did the very same thing!

"Is this why you liked to duct-tape their mouths?" Booth questioned Epps casually, ignoring me purposefully while my jaw went slack and my face burned. I felt betrayed. He _knew_ what position I was in here, and he just intentionally made me look like some stupid, leashed brat, instead of the confident, smart, in-control woman I was trying to be. "Because that I understand, especially with this one."

Not even Epps was impressed with it. "That is the _lamest_ attempt at bonding that I have ever seen." He told Booth, sounding almost saddened and disappointed by how poorly the FBI agent connected. He rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling and took a deep, long breath. "Do you smell that?"

"I smell defeat and failure," I said, lashing out at Epps dryly and only barely refraining from clapping back at my so-called partner. "And quite possibly euthanasia."

"It's the smell of antiseptic," Epps clarified, dragging his eyes back down, devoid of emotion. "My mother smelled like that." It was creepy how he was able to speak without any sort of empathetical connection or sentiment about his own mother. "Entirely obsessed with germs. She washed her hands with ammonia. Mine, too." He opened his eyes and the corner of his mouth twitched. "My one regret is that I didn't make her my _first_ victim. I should've put her under a little stone cross years ago."

The randomness, of course, wasn't truly random. It was the hint. It had to be. There was no other explanation for why Epps had missed an opportunity to capitalize on the clear discord in the ranks, right as I was demonstrating how I felt secure in my place on the team as opposed to my uncertainties in the last round.

"Okay," I said slowly, committing it to memory. _Ammonia, scrubbing hands, mother, stone cross_.

"Okay what?" Booth looked between Epps and I. The former continued to ignore him out of distaste, while I didn't trust myself not to explode if I had to look at him. He wanted me to trust him but he, for no reason whatsoever, went off at me like that.

I stood up from my chair and scraped its legs on the floor while pushing it back in. "After breathing the same air as you, I wish someone could scrub ammonia in my _lungs."_ For good measure, I squatted down enough to reach under the table with my foot and find the link where the chains on his wrists were connected to the latch on the floor. I hooked my ankle around the thick chains and gave a hard pull.

Not expecting it, Epps' hands slid and his shoulders yanked, going as the chain pulled him. He was pulled face first into the table and hit his cheek on the metal hard with a loud thunk.

* * *

I went storming into the bone room as soon as we returned from the prison, only to find Zach looking again over the girl's skeleton, Latin or on the lit exam table in anatomical order. Zach heard my angry footsteps and took his hands away from the metacarpal he was psychoanalyzing, probably top see if there were any more slight, unnoticed inconsistencies in the rest of the bones. I picked up a light blue stool kept in the room to access remains in the higher drawers, moved it over to the side of the table opposite of Zach, and angrily settled onto the top platform to sit.

"How did it go?" Zach asked, oblivious to the entirely aggravated body language.

"I hate it," I announced with a snarl. My eyes darted to Booth when he came walking in after me, hands behind his back. "I hate Epps, I hate that he and I are the same species, I hate that he's still even alive." If it wasn't for the Innocence Project lawyer who had introduced me to the case to begin with, Epps would have been executed over eight months ago. Then, because Booth had had it coming since the questioning in the prison, I glowered furiously at him. "And I really hate that I was undermined in front of him!"

Zach stilled and looked like he regretted asking.

"Don't be mad at me, kiddo!" Booth chuckled. I glared harder. If he wasn't wary of my temper anymore, then I was doing something wrong. Don't be mad at him. Right. Why would I be mad after being disrespected in front of the human I hated the second-most in the entire universe? "I was doing as I was told." _Yeah, and who told you to be a jerk? Because you sure as hell didn't get that message from me!_ "Telling you to shut up was a ploy."

Zach looked over at Booth in visible shock. "You told her to shut up?"

Brennan came in through the doorway about then, her delay explained by the latex gloves she was snapping on that she must have had to stop to retrieve. "He did," she confirmed gravely. "It wasn't received well, and she didn't listen." Of course I didn't! "And now Epps thinks he's an idiot," she finished, also directing a fearsome scowl at our partner.

"Game theory, Bones," Booth reasoned smugly. "For two players to gain an advantage over the one, they must be distinct from each other."

She didn't stop glaring, but the clinical explication had her thrown. "Where did you get that?"

"Considering that it sounds like he was reading out of a textbook, I'm going to go ahead and blame the walking dictionary." I turned my head slowly to stare accusingly at Zach, who flinched back a little.

"I suggested that he set himself apart from you with arrogance and ignorance." Zach copped to it in seconds. It really didn't take much to break him. "Dr. Brennan is the smart one, Booth is now the opposite, and you're however you presented yourself in the room with him."

I crossed my arms. If Zach hadn't actually told Booth to tell me to shut up, then the intern was off the hook. Booth was still in trouble for choosing to interpret it the way he had, though. "I'm violent, temperamental, and ready to push all the buttons I can find." I summarized, curious how Zach would define my 'character,' so to speak.

Zach paused for thought, then was smacked with realization. "Impulsive and angry," he offered. "You're the one he has the most to physically fear from as well as the most motivated to beat him. It also ensures that you won't let Booth or Dr. Brennan's focus slide. You'd be one of the leading roles even if you hadn't been blonde last time."

Clicking his tongue, Booth pointed at Zach's back in agreement. I looked at Brennan over Zach's shoulder. She looked very discontented and irritated. I alternated between glaring at an increasingly nervous Zach and a slightly less confident Booth. "You put a lot of thought into this, didn't you?"

Zach looked down, but Booth looked proud that I had noticed. Brennan looked even angrier when she saw that expression on his face. "Don't enjoy this!" She snapped.

Booth looked startled by her outburst. "What?" He queried. Did he even realize why we objected to his ploy? He acted like he was happy to play along and treat the girl whose bones we now stood around as just a convenient game piece or useful plot device.

"The only reason I am playing this game is to discover the identity of this young woman," Brennan put her hands down on the edge of the table, a flash of the grief she usually compartmentalized coming up to the surface and showing on her face.

I wanted the victim to be respected and the family to have their answers, but my interests were also strongly rooted in Epps paying for a full, accurate, and detailed list of the crimes he committed. Identification fought with justice in my priority list.

"It's a game to Epps because he doesn't care. We do." Booth looked down, appropriately cowed for his behavior and the implications of his uplifted mood. I gazed meaningfully into Zach's eyes. This was one of those lessons that he needed taught to him, because he couldn't do this job without understanding how justice, respect, and objectivity had to interrelate for us to humanely work. "If we have to think of it as a game to win, then that's what we'll do - but don't do it proudly," I warned seriously. This was a time when it wasn't acceptable to be more proud of his utilization of his knowledge than compassionate to the emotions of the people who had been or were being put through hell by the serial killer.

Zach looked down to the bones on the table earnestly and frowned. I wondered if he was trying to see them as more than a collection of bones and instead as an actual person like any of the four of us. Zach may need some things explained to him to fully grasp, but no one who actually spent time with him would ever be able to aptly describe him as heartless. It was just easier to understand feelings when he could relate - and it's hard to relate to the people involved in a murder investigation when you've never been on a side other than that of a scientific advisor.

For me, it depended on the situation. I had tried to stay objective when I started out, but then I'd gotten involved. Being almost assassinated, becoming friends with a victim, one of my friends being threatened with drowning, careless generalizations being made that applied to me - all of these things made my opinions and biases for or against suspects stronger. In this case, the victim concerned me more than I'd have liked to admit. Was she my age? Blonde, like Epps liked? Did he blitz attack her, or did he approach her kindly?

"We've made no progress on identifying the victim." Zach reported after a moment of solemn almost-vigil for the woman on the table.

"Check the junior golf leagues," Brennan instructed both Zach and Booth. We all looked over to the doorway when Hodgins joined the edge of the room, but Brennan finished speaking her train of thought. "Given the amount of wear to her shoulder, elbow, and spine, she must've started golfing at an early age."

We all then looked to Hodgins, signaling that we were at a pause and he should feel free to give us any updates.

"I found minute traces of gypsum and selenium on the mystery wrist bone," he stated. I thought back to chemistry courses. Gypsum was usually found in sediment and fertilizer-rich soil. Selenium sounded familiar, but I want sure why off the top of my head. "Also, phenolphthalein, which is a kind of laxative."

"Laxatives show up on bones?" Booth asked first. Even he knew that was a weird find. He was learning by spending so much time here.

"No," I assured.

Brennan was shaking her head. Zach looked confused just as confused as Booth, and wasn't that an unusual sight? "Not even after years of ingestion."

"The laxative is on the surface of the bone," Hodgins specified, like it wasn't already strange enough. "I have no explanation."

Brennan put her hand on her hips and looked over the skeleton in bafflement. I glared at the table patronizingly. It was just rude to be this unusual without also having clues. "We have scoured every inch of her, x-rayed her, run her through an MRI - what clue are we missing?"

Epps would know what it was. And he would want us to know, or we couldn't play along. We know he wants us to find his victims, because he led us right to three of them earlier in the year. He had told us whatever it was we needed to know to figure it out.

"Last time, his wrist was the clue." I replayed everything he said to me. "This time it was mostly lines about my hair and antiseptic." One antiseptic in particular, too. "Ammonia," I said to Brennan suddenly. Ammonia had a high pH level, making it a base, while phenolphthalein was an acid that could be used as an indicator. Individually they made no sense - together they were a clue. One that we couldn't have gotten if the entire team wasn't involved. He had something against me for sure, but the entire Jeffersonian was on his radar. "He very specifically talked about ammonia," I told Hodgins, getting a little excited.

"Ammonia!" His confusion have way to a huge smile and he smacked himself on the forehead. "Oh, why didn't you say so?"

"Ammonia," Zach breathed upon coming to his own realization.

Booth looked at all of us cluelessly, even a little annoyed that he was getting left out of the loop again. At least two minutes ago, we'd all been in the same boat. "Ammonia?" He questioned, managing to shove a lot of attitude into a mere one word.

"Ammonia," Brennan confirmed knowingly, relieved to have something to go on.

Hodgins threw his arms up and left, jogging. I knew an opportunity when I saw one. I jumped up from the stool. "You explain," I told Brennan eagerly, backing up to the doorway to follow the entomologist. "I want to go play with ammonia."

This was probably the only job I ever could have gotten where I could say that, not be lectured about poor professional conduct, _and_ have my desires recognized.

* * *

"Booth thinks we should get together and buy Brennan a pet," Hodgins said conversationally to Zach and me while I donned protective gloves for the experimental purposes and set the odd-one-out hamate bone onto a small platform in the middle of a translucent, airtight glass cylinder.

"What kind of pet?" Zach curiously questioned, sealing the container once my hands were out of it. The hamate wrist bone was left sitting all on its own in the raised center.

"A pig." Hodgins chuckled at the imagery. "And I don't think he means a _guinea_ pig. A _real_ pig."

I shook my head. Hodgins sounded way too amused at that mental thought. "Not very advisable," I reminded him importantly, just in case he forgot that he was an adult and he shouldn't buy an actual pig for his friend as a joke. "She lives in an apartment in the middle of DC." _With a roommate who isn't sure she could handle a dog, much less a much bigger pig._ "Where would she keep it?"

High heels were followed by Cam, who was doing more running than walking as she rushed into the lab, saw the cylinder of glass, drew herself up higher, realized that we hadn't done anything yet, and then sighed so hard that her size reduced by almost half. "You want to expose a piece of crucial evidence to ammonia gas?!" She asked loudly, looking between us all like we were insane.

Promptly, I put on a smile and said, "Yes, please."

"No," she flatly denied.

Instead of getting worked up about it, I just shrugged. It had been worth trying. I still wasn't a fan of being vetoed, but at least this time, I understood where her objection was coming from. If I didn't know Epps and hadn't been involved in one round of the bastard's games before, I would've been questioning the intelligence in destroying evidence – what if there was something we _hadn't_ found that he wanted us to eradicate? But experience told me that Epps' hints were rarely that detailed and his clues, although sometimes harder to decipher, were usually more like word games than psychological puzzles.

Hodgins sighed at Cam and then went on to explain with his best tone of desperation. " _Besides_ being a laxative, phenolphthalein is a sensitive pH indicator."

"Colorless," Zach put in helpfully, "Unless it's exposed to ammonia."

Which was really rather cool. It was like using invisible ink – Hodgins found particulates of the chemical, but without exposing it to ammonia, we didn't know what shape or symbol that the phenolphthalein on the bone was in. Once we could see the color in contrast to the bone, then we could see what the clue was.

Cam kept shaking her head. "The _second_ you expose this bone, it's useless," she warned. There was the problem we kept coming back to before – her concern was admissibility in court. "Epps wants you to destroy evidence." The difference this time was that I knew she wasn't afraid to call me out on a bad decision, and I wasn't afraid to tell her when she was wrong.

"I know you care about a court case, but that's the wrong thing to care about." I stated bluntly. She looked at me, startled by my upfront contradiction after the somewhat passive-aggressive conflicts of the past month. I kept going, barreling onwards. "Epps is a psychopath. This bone is the next clue. Maybe he has more victims. Maybe he knows another killer. The fact is, he is already in jail. He is never going to get out anyway. Which is more important to you? Getting him a second, yet redundant, sentencing, or finding more victims and giving the families their closure?"

Cam opened her mouth, realized that she couldn't argue that, and then closed it again. She would just have to accept that she doesn't know Epps' character the way that the rest of us, and especially Booth and I, do. His personality and his idea of "round one" is a big influence on how we handle round two, and she doesn't have the benefit of that experience.

"Why would he plant evidence at all?" She asked, trying to either understand or keep making her point to protect evidence.

"Because he's insane!" Hodgins exclaimed, incredulous that she even had to ask.

Zach bit his lip and looked at the bone in the glass chamber, prepared to be gassed with concentrated ammonia. "It _might_ be a win-win scenario for him. If his end game is to disorient Dr. Brennan, he can do that by ruining evidence that he himself planted." Zach looked back up, indicating the bone with his hands. I nodded like I understood what his reasoning was, when really I was just taking his word for it. He had a sick obsession with me, but Brennan was his intellectual rival, and he would want to prove his mental superiority.

"This guy can recite the entire Wiki article on game theory," I cautioned her, pointing at Zach. Zach nodded his agreement and confirmation. Cam looked a little bit exasperated just by his ability to do such a thing. "He can do this for hours."

I watched her as protocol warred with the combined knowledge and experience of three of her employees. Would I have to enact one of the vetoes she granted to undermine her authority? I hoped not, just because using one so soon after getting them seemed like it was a foreboding sign. I was certain that this was the right thing to do, protocol be damned.

"Fine," she decided, and she relented. "You can perform the experiment." I grinned and jumped up on my heels. Hodgins hissed out a _yes_ and Zach looked greatly relieved, picking up the control for the canister of gas attached to the side of the cylinder. " _So,"_ she stressed meaningfully, picking up plastic goggles. "Glasses."

Hodgins and I looked at each other sheepishly before we both grabbed pairs for ourselves. Being closer, I picked up an extra set for Zach and passed them over to him. Cam watched us put them on like a paranoid parent making sure that we put our seatbelts on in the car. It was a little annoying, but to an outsider, it was probably funny.

Cam gave her final nod of assent once we were all goggled-up, and Zach started to flood the cylinder. The ammonia in such a high concentration looked like a cool purple-blue color. It was weird to think that something so pretty could actually be very dangerous if it weren't for the chamber keeping it out of the air the four of us were breathing. The gas swirled around in the glass for a few seconds before Zach reversed the process with the remote. Ammonia was pulled out of the glass, sucked back into the canister, dissipating and letting us see through the glass again. The bone wasn't harmed, but on the side, there was a small blue stain left on it.

"What is that?" The pathologist asked, audibly concerned. Was she going to have a heart attack from the tangible results?

"Not sure," Zach answered vaguely, pulling over a magnifying glass on a mechanical limb to zoom in on the view. We all looked to the corresponding screen on the monitor to the left of the ammonia canister. The blue stain was in the shape of a hammer and a chisel crossing each other.

"A freemason symbol?!" Hodgins' eyes went about as wide as the moon. I exhaled deeply and took off my safety goggles, rubbing my forehead with the back of my hand, holding onto one of the legs. That reaction was bound to have an interesting reasoning behind it. "Hey, this explains the buried-facedown thing! It's all starting to come together!"

Cam looked at me in confusion. I just raised my shoulders and looked away from Hodgins. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he seemed far too excited for it to be anything normal.

"These crossed hammers prove that Epps is working for the top level of the Illuminati!"

Yep, there it was.

"Hodgins," I said, patient only because his preferred option made me snicker. "I _really_ don't think Epps is in the Illuminati." I was glad Booth didn't happen to be here to overhear this discussion. I was pretty sure that there would be something rude said to the entomologist. And something condescending directed at the Illuminati, too.

Zach stared at his friend as if he'd just witnessed Hodgins declare that he rejected science and wanted to pursue a career as a street magician. "That's the cartographic symbol for a mine," he said slowly, pointing out the obvious. For _once,_ Zach had the "normal" reaction to something.

Hodgins faltered, looked again at the screen, and looked down disappointedly. He couldn't meet anyone else's eyes. "… Oh…" he said in a very small voice.

Graciously giving Hodgins time to recover from the serious wound to his pride and his spirit that he had just inflicted himself with, Cam skipped over the part where she said something about his conspiracy theories or his leap over the completely reasonable conclusion. "Epps is telling us that the second victim's in a mine?" She didn't sound cynical this time, and that almost made me cheer. I was glad we'd been proven right, even though I'd been sure that it wouldn't have been a bust anyway. "What kind of mine?"

"One with gypsum and selenium," I said, taking over the still terribly distressed scientist's role proudly. The phenolphthalein had been planted, but the gypsum and selenium had gathered on the bone semi-naturally – when the body had been hidden in the mine, those particulates had collected on the surface and clung to it when the bone was moved to the new victim's skeleton. Simple enough, right?

* * *

We took an hour-long ride out of the city and to a rural countryside area. The nearest mine was pretty far out of our way already, but when Hodgins mapped out the specific minerals we needed to find onto the geographic profiles of the district, he found one with promising levels of everything he'd isolated and identified on the unknown victim's wrist bone. Booth radioed ahead to call for a search party, and we arrived on scene after several other vehicles had already parked and begun to unload. The FBI had several teams of three to offer. They knew that Epps was slippery, and they were not willing to risk another slip-up like last time, when they realized they'd missed an entire two victims.

Brennan shouldered her bag. It looked fuller than it usually did, and she packed in extra flashlight batteries before closing her car door. I adjusted the hem of my shirt over my pants, pocketed a small baggie with clean gloves, and checked to make sure my phone was fully charged before I unplugged it from the mobile battery pack. Brennan was carrying enough supplies for a more thorough on-site examination _if_ we found something. I had my fingers crossed.

Booth made the car beep as it locked and gestured for us to come with him. Purely because of that gesture, I was tempted to refuse and go off on my own, but I swallowed down the lingering resentment and matched paces with my roommate. We passed another team standing by their car.

The mouth of the mine was wide open and almost fifteen feet tall at its highest point. Inside, it became dark very quickly, and I realized after taking a few steps into the shadows that it was much colder inside. Thankful for my jacket, I pulled it closed around my front and did a couple of the buttons. A few other agents were already looking around inside the mine, exploring deeper. At this point, it felt like a cave. Its downward incline was noticeable, but gradual.

Brennan turned on her flashlight so we didn't have to rely on the wavering beams of others'. "In the prison, Epps mentioned a stone cross." She put the light down to our feet, swept it over the ground nearest to us, and then started to lift it to eye-level, getting an idea of the interior shape. "That's what we should be looking for. This is the _only_ abandoned gypsum mine within Epps' known killing ground to also contain selenium."

"Selenium or not, how many abandoned gypsum mines can there actually be?" I wondered. It didn't sound like a very common thing to mine for, and DC wasn't exactly a geographic hotspot for natural resources.

Brennan, of course, was able to answer. "Two in total within the geographical profile that the FBI supplied. In an additional two-mile radius, there's a third."

"Of course there is," I grumbled.

"Six entrances, hundreds of shafts, and half of it's all flooded." Booth whistled. This wasn't a fantastic place to be, and I was looking forward to getting this all over and done with so we could go back to our brightly-lit lab, then to my cozy, familiar apartment. "I want you both to just follow my lead and watch out for yourselves, okay?"

I really did understand that Booth was just inherently protective of the people he cared about, but I didn't want or need any particular coddling. If I were stupid enough to get myself lost in a mine in which we knew Epps had hidden a body, I probably _deserved_ to be lost for a while. "There are entire FBI teams here," I pointed out, giving my hand a wave towards one of the silhouettes at my left. "I don't think we have to worry about getting lost, assuming we don't take off playing hide and seek."

"Look, I just want you to be careful," Booth answered, holding his hands up in a gesture that oddly resembled a strangle. "Why do you always have to respond like being a little more careful is such a terrible request?"

"Because I have more important things on my mind than worrying about accidentally walking into a flooded chute and getting my shoes wet," I replied, taking out my phone and turning on my flashlight setting. The light wasn't as intense as Brennan's flashlight, but it was decent enough to see by.

"I don't think Epps would make it that hard for us." Brennan commented, not acknowledging my bickering with my father. She had never made a habit of getting involved when we went back and forth like that, but lately she seemed to make a point of staying out of it, like she thought it was some family thing. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. When I went to the zoo with Parker and Rebecca and Booth, then yeah, it was probably a family thing, but those ties should be checked at the door when we get to work.

I couldn't see his face very well, but the agent's tone when he answered was scornful and disapproving. "Well, Epps said he wished he'd buried his _mother_ under a stone cross. I bet that is a hint."

 _Oh, you don't say?_ Although I had a hard time resisting sarcasm, instead I muttered, "Or a sign of psychopathy."

Booth stopped walking suddenly. Brennan also stopped and focused her flashlight on the walls of the cave, looking around curiously with her industrial light. The FBI agent held up his hands to cup around his mouth. "Okay, people, listen up!" While he summoned the attentions of the half dozen or so agents in the mine already, I directed my light at the wall nearest to us. The dirt was damper by the ground, but up at our height, it was crumbly and dry. "I'm calling in a splunking team-"

"It's _spe_ -lunking," Brennan corrected automatically.

Booth amended himself. "- _Spe_ -lunking team with imaging capabilities to look for a stone cross."

He continued to issue instructions on a tactical approach, though I narrowed my eyes at his back. It was becoming more complicated with every sentence he added. If we needed imaging technology to find the cross, how could Epps have made it? How could he have found it again to switch around the wrist bones? He didn't have access to that kind of thing, and now it was getting more convoluted. He was twisted in the head, but simple in his methods.

"Holly?" Brennan said my name warily. I hummed and took a couple of steps towards her.

She saw me come closer and lifted her light again, pointing at the same time. There was what looked like an old channel shaft splitting off from our right, but several yards in, it looked like it had caved a long time ago and blocked itself off. Her flashlight illuminated a big collection of steely grey rocks that didn't belong with the dry, clay ground we were walking over.

We shared a look, ignored what Booth was doing, and went closer. The nasty smell, which I had been attributing to mold, grew slightly stronger. She kept her light on the rocks, and after approaching several feet, it became obvious to us that they were deliberately arranged in a cross shape. One line of the cross extended further, towards the cave-in, making it look more like a religious cross.

"That was easy," I commented, sighing. The rocks had been brought in from elsewhere, which made them feel even more unnatural. The incohesive feeling combined with the purposeful formation gave me the creeps.

"Booth!" Brennan called for his attention. Now he was just wasting his time.

He put a hand out to tell her to wait. "Let's focus on the ventilation shafts," he advised loudly. His voice carried well in the cave, and I was a little impressed that he apparently had enough experience in mines to approach it in a thought-out way, but he was going to feel pretty dumb once he realized none of it was necessary. "To the west of the main shafts-"

"Hey, Sherlock!" I interrupted impatiently.

"What?" Booth cut himself off midsentence and turned around to look at us, annoyed that we weren't just letting him finish first. Brennan and I both shone our lights over the cross of stones, exasperated, and his face fell comically. "… Oh," he meekly realized. "Never mind!" He waved off the attention he'd gotten and yelled, "Can we get some light down this shaft, please?"

Someone else left the mine to go get a brighter, portable light source so we could have our hands free. Booth strode over, picking his way over the ground, and took a wide step over one line of the cross to stand partly inside the old channel.

Brennan looked up and met his eyes. "It's the cross, Booth," she stated, gesturing down to it. It was rather obvious to point out, so I was sure there was some emotional response she was processing. If she and I were feeling the same things, then she had been hoping we'd have more time to prepare for it. I wasn't entirely sure I was ready to find another victim.

Booth nodded, exhaling from a deep breath. "Yeah. That is definitely a cross," he agreed.

The field agent came back inside the cave, toting a construction light about the size of a small ice chest. It was connected to an extension cord which she unwound behind her. The light made mine redundant, so I turned it off to conserve the battery and put my phone away. In the meantime, Brennan waited until the light was set down on the ground near us to turn hers off and laid the heavier light on the ground by the cave wall.

I rubbed my hands together nervously. "We can move the rocks," I pointed out, taking the gloves out of my other pocket. I wasn't touching them without something covering my skin. "They don't all look very heavy." Some of them, particularly the ones closest to the intersection, looked like they'd take more strength to move, but the majority seemed awkward but not difficult to displace.

"Yeah…" Booth agreed. "Yeah, let's do that."

He put his foot up on one of the rocks. Brennan, who was following my lead and putting her gloves on, bent down by where I was standing to move one of the larger-looking stones on the part of the cross pointing outwards. I doubled over to help. Each of us took one side and lifted, moving it out of the way.

After only budging it a few inches, the smell became revolting. Booth covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve. I grimaced and stopped breathing, hurrying up to push the stone away. Brennan let it tumble down to the side of her feet. I took a quick step back and covered my mouth. The smell wasn't all mold, although there was some of that; it was decay.

"Oh, ugh!" Booth complained.

As was our luck, the one we'd chosen to move had been covering a skull with one side of the mandible unhinged. The skin was sickly and sallow and disgusting, looking slimy and gross. Although we could see that the jaw was off, the majority of the flesh was still intact. It was absolutely disgusting. It was also very easy to guess what was under the rest of the rocks, which explained why the center of the cross was thicker. There had to be more stones in order to cover an entire corpse.

Neither of her arms were visible yet, but I figured we had enough information to make a reasonable conclusion. "I think we found our missing body," I said, uncovering my mouth and nose tentatively. I'd scarcely seen a crime scene that smelled worse, and it was thanks to the fact that there was still so much organic matter decomposing. "Oh, and look, she's a blonde." On the skull was ratty, oily, matted blonde hair, partly discolored by dust and blood.

Brennan bent her knees and brought her face closer to the body again for a closer look. "It's definitely human," she assessed. "But-"

"What?" Booth anxiously asked before she had the chance to finish.

"But it still has flesh," I stated the obvious, pointing. Brennan nodded, discomfited and uneasy, and stood up straight again. There wasn't a ton that she could do with all of the fleshy stuff still attached. I hoped Cam wasn't planning on an early night or anything. "There's no way this girl was killed seven years ago."

Booth raised his eyebrows at me to ask if I was being serious. There were implications to that which we did _not_ want to consider, but now were forced to. I just nodded. I was no expert, but no matter how well the rocks could preserve temperature and moisture, that body shouldn't look so fresh.

"Cam can be more precise, but I don't think this is more than a week old." Brennan frowned and curled her fingers into loose fists.

"Epps has been in prison," Booth reminded, staring down at the mangled body in growing horror. "Which means… he has an accomplice killing people on the outside."

A shiver went up my back and I looked over my shoulder in paranoia. Even with Epps behind bars, we weren't safe. I wasn't safe, Brennan wasn't safe, no young blonde woman in the District of Columbia was safe. We thought we'd known everyone important, but there was a completely unknown threat left unaccounted for. He could be anywhere.

And it begged the question of how recently this girl _had_ died, and why now, and how long it would take until the serial killer's accomplice developed a taste for murder. How long until Epps used another body to drop his next clue? Even worse, would the accomplice act on his own and take another life? It was one thing if he were working solely under Epps' thumb, but he became an issue all of his own if he grew out of working under someone else's shadow.

"This is the _third_ that we've found in less than a year." I looked to Booth, disheartened. I didn't think that I ever asked for much from him, but I needed him to do what he'd been doing, take care of the situation and make me feel like someone wanted to protect me. The warnings and the protectiveness weren't as irritating now that I knew there may actually be a very real reason to be afraid. "How many more times are we going to have to stand over the bodies of his victims?"


	19. The Blonde in the Game, Part Three

Cam used her very sharp toys to open up the flesh a little further, but there was already a messy rip in the tissue around one of the wrists. We were pretty sure we knew why, but we had to verify it first, so Zach fetched the bone we'd found with the first victim for comparison. The lab felt both alive and dead at the same time. Everyone moved quickly, the fires under our feet lit with anticipation and nerves. Simultaneously, everyone felt kicked down that this was happening, that there was another victim right before us, and possibly another yet to come.

Flesh wasn't my thing, but then, neither were serial killers. Cam and I worked together to quickly get some x-rays taken so that we could look at the bones even before she was ready to autopsy. The Jeffersonian had procedures that we had to go through before bodies could be autopsied or stripped of flesh, but with the time crunch, no one felt it was safe to leisurely wait that long. This way, we could look at the bones, even if we couldn't do so with the level of detail we would have liked to have.

I had a somewhat large folder open with the x-rays inside it, moving up and down along the body and comparing the images of bones to the mangled corpse that remained in front of me. I could make inferences that were precise enough about where the bones and joints were, then compare the bones to the skin and tissue damage.

"This is definitely the body that this hamate bone belongs to," Brennan sighed, a hand on a magnifier. She looked up from the nameless girl's ripped-open wrist. It had been a very messy removal by someone who didn't know what they were doing – probably had no medical background. I filed that away in my head in case it came up again. Anything to narrow down the suspect pool could only be helpful.

"She's obviously female," Cam stated mildly. No one questioned that decision – with so much of the body intact, we were going to trust that she could tell the difference between male and female parts.

"Dentition suggests mid-teens." Brennan added. I sent a quick glance up at the matted, gross blonde hair. More and more, the girl was looking like Epps' ideal kind of victim. He liked blonde, post-pubescent, adolescent women the most – yet another reason why it was so shocking he even wasted his time with Caroline.

"Those bruises around the ankles?" I gestured with my hand several inches above the actual body. The skin around the bruises was pale and no longer held much blood, so the nasty colors of the contusions and abrasions were even more striking. "There's bone damage to go with them, as well as some minor hip displacement on her right side, and… there's something weird about the vertebrae, I think the spine's been _stretched_." I almost couldn't finish that sentence. Because this case was so personal, I felt closer to the victims, and I could imagine that having my spine stretched would be even more painful than it sounded.

Brennan looked over the table towards me curiously. When I saw that she was doing so, I turned the folder over in my hand, curling my fingers around the edges of the papers so that I could hold them up without them falling. She looked at the contorted spine and then back down to the victim. Her eyes traveled to the ankles again.

"He hung her upside down," she realized, more shocked than she was repulsed.

Being upside down just in a fair ride was unpleasant. All the blood rushed to the head, and it was disorienting, and there was more pressure behind the eyes. Gravity pulled on tissue unpleasantly and before long, there was a headache. And that was after just a few seconds, a minute at most, in a context where there's plenty of support and padding to protect everything important. For this girl, who was hung by her ankles, probably with something rough and hard, and for a much longer time… That was just sick.

Cam concurred. "I agree…" I showed her the x-rays, too. Though her specialty wasn't to do with bones, she did know how to read x-rays and could tell when something as clear as spinal stretching was present. "And while she was still alive, too," she added, gesturing at the ankles. They wouldn't have bruised so vividly if blood hadn't still been pumping through the body. "Is that part of Epps' usual MO?"

"No," I stated firmly. Epps had many issues, but physical torture was never what he was into. If anything, he got off on the psychological sadism associated with rape. It was a huge cry from dangling a girl by her feet. "He was into it for the violence of the actual murder, not on torture, and he never had his victims for very long."

She only raised one eyebrow and looked at me closely. "How well do you know his case?" She posed, subtly questioning if it was possible that I wouldn't know.

Except I _did_ know, and I had gone even further than just April Wright's case. I'd kept myself up to date on the investigations on the bodies we uncovered, and I had done some digging into everything the bureau had on Epps. "I know his criminal history inside out and upside down, including psychological profiles and professional reviews of his mental state, to the extent that he was willing to discuss with a psychotherapist," I replied evenly. "He never once demonstrated any inclination towards torture."

Cam closed her hands into light fists and moved them down. "Then the accomplice threw in some flair of his own," she noted, not super enthusiastic.

I had to mumble a little bit of agreement. The torture had happened, whether or not Epps commissioned it himself. I needed to check on the first girl's ankles and see if any similar injuries existed on her. I doubted they would since she had been killed long enough ago for it to have been Epps. His accomplice, however, had clearly taken some liberties in replicating the murders, and had maybe even found some of his own gratifiers.

"Nine years ago, Epps kills someone and buries her. He goes to jail _seven_ years ago." Brennan put her hands on the side of the table and leaned onto it, looking away from the body for a moment while she got her bearings and thoughts together again.

That accounted well enough for the first victim, but not for the blonde before us. Cam stripped off her gloves and the rubber made snapping noises. "Last week, his accomplice kills another girl and swaps wrist bones with the one that Epps buried nine years ago." She trashed the gloves and swept her hair up, retying her ponytail and stretching her fingers. "How did he know where the first girl was?" She asked after a brief pause. "Were they working together all that time ago?"

I couldn't imagine Epps having a partner if he had any choice about it. Even when he was forced to team up with Amy Morton, he manipulated and distrusted her constantly. A relationship like that wouldn't last through seven years of incarceration, if it had even existed in the first place. This partnership would have to be more recent.

"Epps doesn't do teamwork," I grimly replied, holding back a repulsed snort. "If he weren't in prison, he wouldn't even consider an accomplice as anything other than-" My brain caught up with my mouth right before I finished, and I caught my breath, then slowly exhaled. _Of course._ That made the most sense.

Cam leaned her head towards me when I cut myself off. "Than what?" She prompted.

The pathologist hadn't been a part of that conversation earlier, so my focus was on Brennan when I looked up and dully met her eyes. "A patsy," I finished, swallowing and dragging my hand down my face.

Brennan understood and her face cleared. "There's the non-deliberative agent." She recalled, also stripping her gloves off for a break, like Cam had done. She rubbed her thumbs into her palms.

"We can assume that the accomplice isn't fully aware of Epps' master plan, but he may have a role in it." I cautioned. The accomplice was a wild card because he didn't know what he was supposed to be working towards in the overall plot, and even more so now that he was developing his own tastes.

Brennan held her wadded-up, inside-out gloves in one hand and crossed her arms. "How do they communicate?"

I paused for a moment. That had to be important, but there was very little Epps could do to communicate with the outside world. Because of what he was in for, he was under close scrutiny. He had no privacy… but he could be passing codes, or slipping things past guards. He was crafty, much as I hated to cop to his smarts, and prison guards were often overworked or just didn't realize how much of a threat some people posed, even with manacles around their wrists and ankles.

"Phone calls, letters, visiting hours…"

"But those are all monitored," Cam reminded.

"He has a wife," Brennan suggested, sour and displeased. She pursed her lips and disgustedly looked away, still unable to work out in her brain how anyone could forgive a monster.

"We should get this info to Booth. He can request the logs," Cam suggested. It sounded more like an order. I took out my phone to send him a somewhat lengthy text so he'd know what we were looking for. "Anyway, I found other marks on the body. Not a ton, but a few that looked like they could have been burns. What do you think?" She asked Brennan, but both of us went over to the thighs and calves where Cam was pointing.

Without gloves, none of us touched the body. Brennan squinted at it to be sure, but I was already certain and thinned my mouth unpleasantly. A new wave of sympathy and anger hit me, so it took a second for me to feel like I had enough control over my volume to answer.

"Those are cigarette burns," I stated factually, crossing my arms.

Our boss nodded. "That's what I was thinking. Maybe Hodgins can pull particulates and confirm."

"No need," I tiredly said, uncrossing my arms reluctantly and pulling up my right sleeve. I only pulled it up as far as I had to in order to show a couple small burns on my own skin. I had lived a lot longer than this victim had after receiving them, so mine were far more healed. Most of them had healed entirely, but there were a few that had scarred over, and the skin looked just a little bit off-colored. "I'd recognize them anywhere."

Cam looked at my arm, looked up at me, and then back down again. I tugged my sleeve down roughly after being sure that she saw. I knew what I was talking about, and that was all that she needed to know. Civil or not, friends or not, I didn't want her to think I had a tragically messed up backstory, and I never knew who was going to be content without asking questions I didn't want to answer.

While I moved my arms defensively behind my back, pretending that it was just a casual, meaningless motion, the pathologist left the exam table and went back to the one by the computer. "And there's something else I found in her shoes," she started, taking the hint to let it go. "It was jammed up in the toe."

She took out a golden pendant, already dropped into a little, pocket-sized evidence bag. The pendant was a small circle about the width of two quarters and there was a thinner, golden chain threaded through stringing holes in the top. Brennan reached out to take it and the two of us looked at it side-by-side. There was a vaguely familiar, feminine face on the front, bowed down with a thin hood lifted over her head. In the border around the outside, _SAHS_ was engraved in all capital letters at each of the cardinal directions.

"She wasn't _wearing_ it?" Brennan was appropriately surprised. The figure was pretty clearly some religious idol, so shoving it in a shoe seemed not just disrespectful, but very uncharacteristic of anyone of faith while being held in captivity and tortured. I would've guessed they'd want to wear it, or keep it closely accessible.

Cam shook her head as an answer while a card swiped and the platform security beeped. A green light flashed on the control panel to herald Angela's arrival as she joined. "The mine victim's dental work identifies her as Sarah Koskoff, from Bethesda, Maryland." She stopped the clicking of her heels several feet away from the body and deliberately refused to look. The artist turned her tablet around so we could see. Sarah looked old enough to be in Epps' victim pool, had strikingly pretty hair, and green eyes so lively that they might have sparkled in sunlight. "She disappeared three weeks ago… sixteen years old."

"Young, blonde, pretty…" Brennan sadly summarized the highlights of what we were all looking for. They certainly applied to Sarah. I turned my head to the table and compared what I saw. It was hard to imagine the body as anyone so happy and bright like in Sarah's driver's license photo. "She fits his victim profile perfectly."

There was a disconnect, though, between how long Sarah had been missing and how long she had been dead. The place we'd found her in had been damp, humid, hot. If her body had been laying out in the mine for almost a month, she would look a lot worse.

"You know what that means, right?" I asked, unintentionally interrupting Cam, who had just started to say something at the same time. She gave me a gesture with her hand to go ahead. "She was held captive for two weeks before she was killed," I finished, staring at the body. This made everything at least twice as bad.

* * *

My phone rang while I was in Brennan's office, taking a quick lunch break while she catalogued and returned Sarah's bone to the rest of her remains. I didn't customize my ringtones, but I did make a point of using caller ID. When I saw that I was Booth trying to get in touch, I decided it was probably important enough to answer and put aside my banana and pretzels. I didn't have much of an appetite, but if I didn't eat something, then I'd start lagging sooner or later.

I finished chewing before I answered and put it on speakerphone so I could keep working through my snack. "Speak and be heard, mortal," I commanded halfheartedly, then popped another few mini-pretzels in my mouth.

I could feel him rolling his eyes at me, though he didn't take the time to tell me off or to make a sarcastic reply. _"Listen,"_ he said seriously. I appropriately schooled my face and kept munching quietly. Whatever he had was more important than taking a couple minutes to relax. _"I talked to Sarah Koskoff's parents. They said her dream was to own her own beauty shop. She worked at a hair salon in the city."_

I almost wanted to snark about how it was ironic now that her hair was so disgusting, but that would've been so crass that I think Angela would have actually hit me if she heard, so it was probably a place to draw the line between morbid humor and bitchiness. One happened to get me through the day half the time, but the other was unnecessary, and we had enough unpleasantness to handle, between Epps and the generally lacking sense of safety thanks to his accomplice.

"I have a bad feeling about this," I sighed, sitting back on Brennan's very comfortable office couch.

 _"_ _Yep,"_ the agent confirmed, popping the consonant. _"M Salon, Cleveland Park, owned by Caroline Mapother."_

The salon may not have changed its name, but I could take a strong guess that the owner certainly had. "Mapother nee Epps," I predicted, and when Booth didn't correct me, I sighed and shook my head. "It's not looking very good for her right now." Maybe she killed Sarah. Maybe that was why she was really visiting with Epps – she was crazy, too. At least something would make sense if that were the case.

The seriousness was still there, but it was tainted with a little bit of smug satisfaction. Booth had a terrible habit of _enjoying_ himself when he was able to point at something and say that he was right. _"Remember when I was nice to her and you basically acted like she was a pariah?"_ He accused conversationally. _"This is why."_

So that she would cooperate and give us – well, him – actual answers to questions. It hadn't seemed like it was super important to consider that back when she was just some weirdo who married a death row psychopath. Now it looked a little more pertinent. "Yeah, yeah," I grumbled.

* * *

Caroline was the sole owner of a brightly-lit salon with pleasant instrumental music on the east side of the city. Her wallpaper looked a little outdated, but no one went to a hair salon for its style, anyway. "M Salon" was scripted on the inside of the large glass front in a vivid orange-red color with a white border.

She was closing up the cash register as we entered. "Thank you," she said, smiling at an adult woman who held the hand of a kid. Caroline offered a bowl of candy lollipops, so the child took one, chimed thanks loudly, and stuck it in her mouth while she kept touching the freshly-trimmed ends of her hair.

The two customers left while Booth and I waited. I looked around at the waiting lobby. It wasn't very big, but about a dozen chairs sat with their backs to the window and several small coffee tables offered trendy magazines. Each table had at least one on fashion. A water cooler was set up to the right.

Caroline looked better in this lighting than she had in the prison. Her hair seemed healthier and her cheeks had more color in them. If it really was because of the lighting in the super-max, I was curious how bad _I_ had to have looked. She had a half-apron tied around her waist and wore a comfortable wool sweater while she worked.

"Hi," Booth said to her after the bell over the door rang as it closed. He smiled and waved pleasantly.

Epps' wife was more cautious. Her pretty smile disappeared slowly. Trepidation made her hold her hands down in front of her and twist her fingers nervously. "Hi," she replied, focusing on Booth. "Is… is Howard okay?" She asked, sweeping her straightened hair back behind her shoulders.

I couldn't help making a disgruntled face at her. Epps had murdered four women (that we knew of) and had a hand in the death of a fifth. He _deserved_ some pain. That idea of karma and moral justice fought with the impulse to soothe worries. If Epps weren't a homicidal psycho, I wouldn't object at all to that she asked. It seemed like a reasonable question for a concerned spouse.

"He's in perfect health and as safe as he can be," I replied, grumbling a little bit. I was disappointed but could still hold out hope. Even if this case pushed his execution further back, there were other ways to die in a prison. McVicar had proved that.

Booth sent me a reproachful look very quickly. His eyes clearly said, _keep trying, you sound upset_. "You don't have to worry about him, Mrs. Epps," Booth reaffirmed with a more uplifted voice, turning back to face her and approaching the counter. "I couldn't help but notice the 'help wanted' sign in the window." He tilted his head. "Did you recently lose one of your employees?"

I paraphrased in my head to _did you recently torture and kill one of your employees?_

Caroline's mouth did an odd thing between a wry smile and an irritated purse of her lips. "It's hard to keep help that doesn't steal from you," she stated vaguely, not really answering the question. She pulled the lollipop bowl so that the lip wasn't over the edge of the counter and speared the merchant's copy of the receipt from the kid's haircut on the receipt block.

"Did Sarah Koskoff steal from you?" Booth questioned. He used Sarah's name to see if he could get a response that would sway him one way or the other on her guilt.

Caroline looked up quickly, a little surprised, but she made another glance down to his hip where he carried his sidearm, remembered he was a fed, and silently answered her own question. "No, she didn't," she told us. The little bit of resentment from her other comment was absent when she referred to Sarah. "Why? What did she do?"

"She was abducted, tortured, and murdered." I was blunt and glared at her incredulously.

It was a totally normal question, I knew that, but something snapped and I couldn't listen to her talk about Epps like he was someone to cheer for and just _assume_ that Sarah – a sweet sixteen-year-old, like Amy – had been the one to do something wrong. Why did she just _assume_ that we were after Sarah when we'd already establish we were on Epps' case? Was she really letting herself be so damn blind? How could she _sleep_ at night knowing the kind of actions she was excusing? I could barely sleep and I was _condemning_ the same behavior.

Whether or not she knew about Sarah's death had been unclear before, but it was obvious that she hadn't been aware of the extent of her suffering, at the very least. Caroline froze and some color drained out of her face. I'd never known anyone who could fake a physiological reaction.

I persevered. When someone was shocked was usually the best time to try to get information, because they were so far off their game that they couldn't right themselves and think about it first. "When was the last time you saw her?"

"Uh…" Caroline rubbed her open hand along her forehead, shocked and tired and distracted. "Three weeks ago?" She guessed, unsure. I knew Booth looked at me for a second and I gave a minute nod, confirming. The timing fit. "She just… stopped coming to work, she – she _died?"_ Caroline pulled a stool out from underneath the register. The legs scraped on the floor gratingly and she sat down, flexing her fingers around the edge of the table.

"She didn't just _stop coming to work,_ " I forcefully corrected her, baleful and spiteful. "She was busy being held upside down by her ankles."

Booth drew a hand across his throat swiftly while Caroline had her head turned, trying to shut it out and not have to picture it. I thought it was important that she did. Maybe she'd get the message if she could relate the hell her _beloved_ husband inflicted with someone she knew. She had no business saying any lines about how he's reformed or what-the-hell-ever if she can't actually think about the things he really did.

"Did you ever talk to Howard about her?" Booth was far gentler than I was, and I shoved my hands in my pockets aggressively. Caroline didn't need _coddling._ She needed a damn _wake-up call_.

"Uh, I don't know…" Caroline put her hands in her lap and gripped her fingers tightly. "Maybe?" She uncertainly answered with a halfhearted shrug.

"Did he ever see a picture of her?" Booth added, looking around the salon. There were a couple of "team photos" where several young women and a young man were posed together, all wearing the aprons with the salon's name ironed on. One of them could have been Sarah, if I had been close enough to really get a good look.

"I don't like this…" Caroline shook her head while she looked between me and my father. "What's going on?"

Booth put his hand on the counter, close to him but not too far from her. I think it was supposed to have some sort of comforting meaning, but I still didn't think she needed comforting as much as she desperately needed a reality check.

"Sarah was found buried, facedown, in an abandoned mine," Booth explained softly, lowering his voice out of respect for the dead. "The back of her head bashed in… wrists and ankles tied." What we didn't know was how much of the specifics Caroline knew, so he added just to make sure she understood what we were getting at, "Your husband's MO."

Caroline drew her hand back instead of reaching for the agent's. "Poor Sarah…" she breathed mournfully.

I abrasively interjected, "That seems like a bit of an understatement." _Poor Sarah_ was what she would've said if Sarah's boyfriend dumped her or her parents were getting a divorce. It didn't quite cover anything within the literal life-or-death category of terrible things that could happen to a person.

The woman lifted her hands up in a steepled position so her fingertips were about level with her bottom lip. She whispered something short. Booth and I both stayed quiet out of respect for religious practice. It only took a few seconds, anyway.

When she had finished, she rubbed her nose and put her hands down. Her eyes opened after she was less visibly upset. "But Howard…" she started out shakily. She heard this, paused, and breathed deeply. When she restarted, she looked up with a touch of defiance. "Howard's been in prison for the last seven years. How could he kill anyone?"

"He has an accomplice," Booth informed her solemnly.

Before she could start thinking that being in prison exonerated him, I put a hand up to get her attention. "Whether or not he was the man who physically killed her, he still orchestrated it," I stressed sternly. I was sick of her saying how Epps was deserving of a second chance. Second chances don't apply to serial killers.

Even though she'd made one of the stupidest decisions I'd ever seen anyone make (marrying the bastard), Caroline proved she wasn't as dumb as she seemed. "You think _I'm_ his accomplice?" She accused, drawing her shoulders up in offense.

Booth mildly shrugged. "You love your husband," he said, neither confirming or denying.

"I love the _good_ in Howard," she retorted sharply. I almost asked her to define good and see if we were thinking about the same word. "I _reject_ the evil."

The simmering annoyance I'd been feeling bubbled up again. If she really rejected evil, she wouldn't have married its epitome. "Hey, that good in him you just mentioned? How deep did you have to dig to find it?" I coldly demanded. "Because I dug several feet and all I found were more skeletons. _Literally_." You can't cherry-pick qualities of a person you like. You have to go all or nothing. She chose to take all of him, and that means having to accept her husband's a monster.

Caroline glowered at me, almost rising up to the challenge. In the prison, she had seemed meeker. I didn't like that part of me had preferred it when she seemed easier to push around, but I _really_ wished she weren't looking so ready to stand up for a _killer_. Of all the reasons to grow a pair…

"You can think whatever you want," she told me heatedly. "I can see you've made up your mind. Your bitterness doesn't change how I _feel_ , and what I feel is _love_. We're going to have a _child_ together," she shared, going too far. My face must've shown my horror because she proudly held her chin higher. "I've petitioned the court to let Howard donate," she added, like she'd just proved something to me.

 _That didn't prove how in love you are. That proved how many marbles you're missing_.

Not even the FBI agent had anything positive to say about that surprise. He turned his head away so he could express his frustration, then looked back once he thought he had it under control.

I narrowed my eyes at her. She thought she was teaching me a lesson by oversharing? "Let's hope Baby Epps doesn't follow his daddy's career steps," I shot back stingingly. "Not that you should worry. You're not daddy's type, anyway."

I almost felt like I'd gone too far, but the words had already left my mouth. Epps' victimology was the way it was because his sexual gratification was tied with violence. He was turned on by young, hot blondes – not by brunettes his own age. Caroline probably knew that, even if she refused to admit it to herself. Still, she stared back at me without a quick clapback as if I'd said something awful.

"Okay," Booth said after a pause went by in silence. He was cautious, as if saying one wrong word would make everything explode. "Mrs. Epps, I have a search warrant here for your home and your shop. We'd just like to take a look around and then we'll be out of your hair."

She pulled herself out of her daze and kept her eyes locked on me angrily. Fury burned behind her eyes even as she refrained from letting it creep out into her tone. "You don't need a search warrant," she coolly informed, completely ignoring the small packet that Booth was offering her. "You can look anywhere you want, because you won't find anything."

* * *

In Brennan's office, I tried to make myself comfortable on the small couch, but it was hard to do with the context. How was I supposed to relax and lean back right after finding out that Sarah had been tortured? At least Epps had only ever bludgeoned his victims. He'd never had an interest in psychologically and physically torturing them for long periods of time.

Not the bludgeoning was, by any means, acceptable. His accomplice's screw-up brain didn't somehow nominalize the screw-up mentality that Epps already had going for him. How could any competent, logical person be willing to overlook Epps' history of murder? And that was assuming that there wasn't rape involved, too – we knew he got off on it to some extent, and the victims we'd unearthed the first time had been too decomposed to get any evidence of sex, forced or consensual.

"She is _completely_ nuts," I established right off the bat, sinking into the cushions and leaning against the arm of the chair. I didn't realize until I had rested my arms that my shoulders were kind of stiff.

Booth sat down on the other side of the couch and toed his shoes off to make himself at home, a habit he'd started a long time ago that Brennan had given up on trying to train him out of. The team had tried to make me feel welcome in their offices, but Booth had taken their hospitality for granted and I suppose it offended them a little.

"She has faith that there's good in everyone," he tried to argue on Caroline's behalf.

"Psychopathy isn't a bad habit!" I almost laughed just in callous dismissal of his argument. There's a huge difference between being an optimist and being an idiot! "You can't join a twelve-step program to get over it. It's a character trait. It's psychological. It will never go away! Psychopathy makes Epps who he is, even more so than the IQ he likes to boast about."

While Booth and I argued over Caroline's sanity, Brennan sat down in the chair behind her desk, pulling open one of the drawers and taking out a plastic evidence bag. She held it over the desk and smoothed her fingers over it through the translucent plastic. Booth glanced at her, but then dismissed it.

"My agents didn't find anything," he sighed softly. "I was hoping Sarah had been held in the basement of the beauty salon… and, you know, not everyone can be as rational as you, okay?" Booth intentionally looked a little patronizing at me. "You see psychopath, she sees misunderstood."

I nodded, pretending to understand the difference in perspective that he was trying to explain. "I have survival instincts, she has self-destructive impulses," I concluded.

"You don't think that's a little harsh?" He scolded.

"No!" I exclaimed, finding it ridiculous that he could think it made sense in any reasonable person's head. "If she were blonde, I'd say she had about as much of a survival chance in a relationship with him as a cockroach in a fumigated home," I declared boldly, holding my head up. Not so much in pride, but as a sign that I fully believed in what I said.

Giving up on my strong opinions, Booth shook his head and turned to Brennan, looking for a third party to maybe convince me that there was another way to look at the situation. "You're being kinda quiet. Anything you feel like adding in?" Then he really did notice the evidence that she was thoughtfully holding, chewing on her lip while she considered. "What's that?"

Brennan looked up like she was just now being alerted to our presence. "Religious medal," she answered, holding it up so the pendant on the chain was facing Booth. She stood up from her chair and walked around the desk, flattening the bag out over the medal and handing it down to Booth. "Sarah had it in her possession."

The medal was golden and glinted with a glare when Booth tilted it slightly towards me. "St. Agnes, patron saint of young women, especially those who remain pure," he mused aloud, looking over the engravings on the front.

Brennan's face was honestly puzzled. "How do you know that?"

"I'm Catholic, Bones," he reminded her, chuckling.

"SAHS," Brennan prompted. The letters were probably emblazoned on the pendant.

"Ooh, let me try." I uncrossed my arms, sat up, and then scooted forwards on the cushion. Given the saint that was on the medal, the first two were a pretty easy guess; HS was less certain, but given that Sarah was a high-school age girl, I took the chance. "Saint Agnes High School?"

"Yep, good job," Booth praised without much enthusiasm. I suppose I raised his standards where I was concerned with all the ass-kicking I did. "Except…" His sarcastic smile faded and his eyes darkened. "Except Sarah Koskoff went to public school." Holding tight to the evidence bag, he leaned into the back of the couch. "Oh, God."

"What?" Brennan asked in alarm.

The annoyance at Caroline returned in full force, but this time it was accompanied by the same twisting, sickening feeling that I felt when Zach had compared the trauma injury to a tire iron's mark. I swallowed and breathed out deeply until there was no air left in my lungs in an effort not to worsen the stomach-wrenching nausea.

"It means there's another victim somewhere."

Booth sat upright and dropped the bagged medal onto the couch beside him. "I have to go talk to a nun," he realized, looking even more unhappy than he'd been when we'd uncovered the body in the mine.

I exhaled again, then inhaled and told myself to straighten out – _God._ This case was just getting worse by the hour, wasn't it? "Probably not as perky as Julie Andrews," I joked uneasily, trying not to reveal to the others exactly how anxious I was beginning to feel.

What if there was another girl, kidnapped, terrified, and tortured, being hung upside down by her ankles right that very moment?

* * *

The staff of the high school were very polite, though not particularly friendly. They all wore nuns' habits with the exception of the student volunteer who showed them to the administrator's office. She had on a rosary with a cross, but the rest of her clothes seemed totally normal and contemporary, even down to the stylish rip on her jeans. (It was below her knee, so I guess it didn't violate the dress code.)

The office was warmer than I had expected. I'd somehow cultivated the idea of a Catholic school (or any religious school, really) being cold, rigid, and unwelcoming. 'Dress like this' and 'speak like this' and 'don't you dare talk to the opposite sex'. While St. Agnes _was_ an all-girls' school, it was far from what I'd imagined. The interior reminded me of my own high school, but with more Christian paraphernalia, and in fact, I think it was actually cleaner. The inside of the office had warm brown furniture, bright but not harsh lights, and several photographs of students at school events and trophies won by clubs and organizations. They weren't big on sports, but I could see right away that they had a good speech and debate club.

The principal was older, somewhere in her fifties, with straight blonde hair. Most of it was hidden underneath her hood, but I could see her fringe, which she didn't cover. She had that stern, almost angry resting face that many older teachers seemed to have, but nothing about her tone or attitude suggested hostility, so I was reserving judgment on that.

She introduced herself as Sister Karen Dunne, so although I didn't really want to be calling anyone "Sister" or "Father," I realized this was an environment where they didn't mean what they usually meant to me and reminded myself several times not to call her miss on accident. It was already a tense situation, I didn't need to go making things more awkward. She offered us some water and welcomed us into the office.

She had a page up on her computer. I could see that the page had information in the reflection of a glass display case behind her but wasn't able to read any of it. She shook her head at Booth, answering his initial question. "We have no student at St. Agnes named Sarah Koskoff."

"I was afraid you'd say that," I sighed softly. Double enrollment seemed pretty unlikely, but it had really been what we were hoping for.

"Maybe she's a friend of one of your girls?" Booth asked as a follow-up, still leaning towards any chance that Sarah could've gotten the medal as opposed to it being a clue from the accomplice that there was someone else missing.

Sister Dunne was already shaking her head patiently in reply. She waited until he had finished his sentence to answer. "As soon as you called me last night, we implemented a telephone tree asking precisely that question." She looked at me, too, respectfully acknowledging my involvement. "We received no response."

Not all parents would have picked up the phone, or listened to their voicemail, but we couldn't go door-to-door asking every family who attended the school. Without that to go off of, we had to give up our attempts. It was time to stop _wasting_ time and figure out who was in danger and how the school was connected to our serial killers.

I leaned forward to put my elbows on my knees and rub my face exhaustedly. Brennan had insisted that I sleep for a few hours, but it was really hard to rest while knowing someone else might be in danger. I hadn't exactly been looking forward to this meeting, but it was very important, and we needed to have it to move forward in the case. I couldn't stop thinking about it every time I closed my eyes, and while I was sleeping, I had hazy, blurry dreams about smoke and darkness. They didn't scare me, per se, but they were very unsettling.

Booth bit his tongue for a moment and then sighed, also leaning forward. "Do the names Howard Epps, Caroline Epps… or Caroline Mapother mean anything to you?"

The nun cocked her head and gestured to the keyboard. She hadn't touched it since we'd come back in. "May I use the keyboard?"

"Yes, Sister, of course." Booth answered quickly while I just kind of frowned into my hands, questioning why she felt the need to ask permission. She wasn't a suspect, so we weren't concerned with her contacting anyone or deleting anything.

She moved her mouse and started to perform a search, then looked up at Booth very intently. He just watched, not sure about the delay but hesitant to ask in case he came across as rude. After several seconds, Sister Dunne slowly said, "I need to enter a password."

"Oh." Booth understood and quickly turned his chair. I was already sitting where I couldn't see the screen or part of the keyboard, but he was right in front of her. "Yeah. I'll be right over here." He grabbed the arms of the chair and shifted it so it was pointing towards the wall. Sister Dunne started typing now that she felt her information was secure, while Booth just kept talking. "I'm Catholic," he shared. It made me think he wasn't too thrilled with being asked, however subtly, to not watch. "I go to mass every Sunday. Well… almost every Sunday…" I sent him a look that he wasn't helping his case much with that part, and he looked at me and asserted, "I'm very trustworthy."

 _Just stop,_ I mouthed at him disapprovingly. _Not the point._ The staff were responsible for the integrity of personal information they held on students, including addresses and pertinent medical information. I didn't begrudge her wanting to keep the passwords secret. If someone under twenty can make those connections and be chill, then a professional, thirty-something FBI agent should definitely be able to.

She gave her computer time to load. It seemed like it ran on older, slower technology than the lab used, and it definitely processed slower than the phone Hodgins had bought me. She moved her hands off of the keyboard. "Nobody by any of those names," she reported. Then she implemented her naturally stern voice to seriously question why we were here. "I feel that I have been very patient in regards to not asking what all this is about."

When it came to revealing information about a case, I usually air on the side of caution so I don't get in trouble and no one else is compromised. With this one, though, I knew there was no chance Epps would ever trust a blonde woman like the principal enough to be involved in a plot, and she seemed like an unlikely perpetrator anyway. I didn't want to waste time nitpicking or phrasing when we could just be upfront and convey the immediacy of the threat.

"We have a murder victim named Sarah Koskoff," I explained briefly, reaching into my pocket. I had brought the religious medal with us, still sealed in the plain evidence bag. "She was found with this." I placed it onto the desk, where Sister Dunne curiously picked it up, smoothed the plastic to see the image better, and looked at the seal. Her face clouded when she recognized it, proving that our guess had been correct. "We thought it might be from here."

She looked up. The cool, serious expression she'd had was replaced with one of alarm and concern, her brows knitting together and some color draining from her face. Right away, I knew there was bad news. "Helen Majors," she whispered.

"Sorry?" Booth bemusedly asked.

Sister Dunne held out the necklace for us to take back. Booth took it from her hand, which now had a slight shake. "This golden medal is given to the Holy Spirit award winner every year," she offered, troubled. "I presented this medal to Helen Majors myself."

"May we please see Helen Majors?" Booth must have felt this was a pretty obvious question to ask, judging by how his question was stressed. Sister Dunne looked down as if she was unsure so Booth added, "Just to talk to her?"

"Helen left school three days ago," the principal responded worriedly. "No one has seen her since."

* * *

The principal of the high school gave us a photograph of Helen, the missing student, from the very ceremony where she received the medal we found with the second victim. Helen wore a blue track suit and was positively beaming at the camera, shaking hands with Sister Dunne while holding up the award for the photograph. Like Sarah, she fit Epps' victimology.

Booth sent her name through agents back at the FBI building and found that Helen Majors had a missing persons report. It was filed only a day ago, as the law established that people were only officially missing after forty-eight hours. According to her parents' statements, Helen had called them as she was leaving school, but never arrived home. Angela was looking through public surveillance – traffic cameras and the like – but, knowing Epps, he would have instructed his accomplice on how to avoid detection. There were always blind spots. It was just a matter of finding them.

Brennan was not feeling the optimism, but I was trying to stay determined. The partner had tortured Sarah for weeks before he finally killed her. I was under no delusions that Helen was safe, but it wasn't too ridiculous to think she might at least be _alive._ I knew from experience that some experiences were hell to come back from, but I was grateful for everything I'd gained when Booth and Hodgins saved me from Kenton and his dogs.

Booth, as usual, was driving. He was very possessive and territorial about his car. He was on and off the phone throughout the ride, giving me and Brennan a ride back to her – well, our – apartment. His phone calls were continually with various agents in the FBI. Of the four he'd either made or received, two were from the same agent.

Since learning for sure that there was another girl missing, Brennan hadn't let go of the medal. The killers were taunting us by leaving it to be found. It was just enough for us to know who the next victim was, but it had been dunked in bleach (Hodgins' best guess) before being planted with Sarah, preventing us from getting any real evidence off of it. Now we had to handle knowing that there was a terrified young woman out somewhere in the District of Columbia, but we had no idea where to start looking.

Brennan compared the necklace to the photographic copy, smoothing her thumb down over the plastic protecting it. "Three days ago, Helen had that medal." The photo was timestamped, so we knew we could rely on that timeline. "Yesterday, we found it with Sarah Koskoff's dead body."

"Sarah was held for two weeks," I reminded her, feeling a queasy sensation in my stomach. It was odd when I actually _hoped_ a victim was being tortured, but in this case, the longer the accomplice was entertained, the better Helen's odds of surviving until we figured out where she was stashed away. "Helen could be, and likely is, still alive."

"Kay. Yep. Thanks." Booth hung up his short phone call, which has lasted less than a minute, and slipped his cell phone into the slot under the dash. "We have Caroline Epps under surveillance," the agent informed. "If we were wrong, and she _is_ involved, she might just lead us to her."

Just as soon as Booth started moving again through traffic, his phone started to buzz. The vibration rattled against the keys by his phone and made a superbly annoying noise. He swore under his breath and picked it up again, answering it without looking down and holding it up to his head. Booth kept steering with his other hand while he answered briskly.

Brennan emphatically dropped the photo and the medal at once into her lap. "I hate this," she declared, holding herself tensely. Booth looked at her and held up a finger to tell her to shush while he was on the phone. She did the exact opposite, insulted that he wasn't listening. "I don't want to find some dead girl's remains in some mine!" She raised her voice.

"None of us do!" I promised her, also stressed, but I was careful not to sound like I was yelling. I tried never to yell at Brennan, and rarely at Booth. Being yelled at had bad memories for all of us. "Which is why we have to find Helen and identify the accomplice so no one else can be targeted," I finished, reminding her that the game wasn't over yet. We could still come out on top.

Booth moved the phone further from his mouth and audibly hissed at us since the finger didn't work. I rolled my eyes. Was that really the most important thing right now? I slumped in the back seat and Brennan testily glowered, but both of us let him have his phone call instead of starting a fight.

"Reiner Hatin?" Booth repeated back to make sure he heard right. I guess he did. "Address?" He moved the receiver further from his mouth again and pressed it into his jaw. He waved a hand at the navigation system and repeated to Brennan, "7408 Haskell Street, Cleveland Park."

He hung up that phone call without saying anything else to the person who'd called, so I hope there wasn't anything else of importance they'd wanted to talk about. Next he took up the law enforcement radio that he kept in his car, hidden in the hollow console between the front seats. He turned it on to a little bit of static, then radioed in. "2-2-7-0-5 to Control, I'm en route to a possible HRT incident." He repeated the address he'd just given to Brennan and followed up with, "Requesting backup."

The radio loudly buzzed in static before the response came. Booth winced and held it further from his ear. _"Affirmative, 2-2-7-0-5. 7408 Haskell."_

 _HRT,_ I mouthed to myself. _Hostage Rescue Team._ They were basically like SWAT, but less prestigious, and generally operated solely as an elite branch within the FBI. "You got another lead?" I asked hopefully, sitting forward again.

"Epps' prison letters log shows in the last year he wrote six letters to a man by the name of Reiner Hatin at that address." He explained quickly, carelessly dropping the radio back into the console and closing it up. He sped up and passed a car that was actually going the speed limit. "Caroline Epps may not be the accomplice after all!"

On hearing the good news, I moved a hand distractedly down to my waist and felt the gun in its holster. It didn't make me feel safe, exactly, but I did feel a lot less nervous knowing that I had the means of defending myself and my partners. Epps and anything relating to him made me feel like I might be attacked at any given moment.

Brennan was livened up, too. Although still pessimistic and gloomy, she moved the medal and the photo off of her lap, putting them instead in the dash slot with Booth's keys and phone. She turned the dial for the radio volume all the way to the left, making the music go from almost inaudible to totally mute, and ran her hands over the knobs and buttons on the controls.

Booth shook his head and swatted lightly at her wrist, pushing her hand out of the way. "What are you doing?!"

"Where's the siren on this thing?" She questioned annoyedly. _What, would you like there to be a big, red, labeled button?_

Booth more insistently shoved her hand back over onto her side of the car. "Don't touch!"

After making such a deal out of her trying to turn on the siren, he gave her a long, dirty look, punctuated by quick flashes back to the road and surrounding traffic, before turning the sirens on himself.

* * *

Haskell street was just some weird mix between the suburbs and the country. The houses had large lawns and almost all of them had fences up between them. The driveways were covered in dust and gravel, even though there was a main road less than a mile away.

Booth's car GPS had him turn into the dirt driveway outside of the last house on the block. 7408 was in white block letters with chipping paint by the door, and the house itself wasn't in any better shape. It looked like something out of a home improvement show – as the 'before' photo. The front door wasn't even entirely on its upper hinge and the glass was broken out of one of the windows.

Plumes of dust were still settling from the tires when Booth and I got out on the same side of the car. Brennan shut her door on the other, hopping onto the grass. It was sparse, but there were patches of it in the drive. I took my gun out of my holster while walking around the back of the car while Booth went the other way, both of us focused on the house.

 _What if Helen is there?_ I thought to myself, feeling my pulse pick up its pace. _What if the accomplice is, too?_

"Okay, Bones," Booth started, quick and authoritative. He wasn't wasting time. I turned the safety off of my sidearm and pulled back the slide to cock it. "I'm going in. You're gonna wait outside." He looked at both of us and pointed at the car. "Get behind that and wait for HRT."

"No way!" I objected. Him telling Brennan to stay back was almost expected, but when he turned that bossy glare on me with the same order implied, I was shocked. "I have a gun, I can shoot people now!"

I expected Brennan to be more upset by being benched, but instead of loudly protesting, she sighed and tried to reason. "Booth-"

"I don't want to hear it, alright?" He cut her off urgently, taking a step forward. I knew this tactic by now, clenched my jaw, and held my ground. When he wanted to guide me to move somewhere, Booth had figured out that if he moved where he didn't want me to be, I would go where he _did_ to avoid being touched. Well, getting up in my personal space wasn't going to work this time. "When backup arrives, tell them there's a federal employee already inside."

"But the-" Brennan started to say again. I would've crossed my arms if I weren't carrying a gun, and I looked at her expectantly to set up an excellent argument in favor of us _not_ being left out here like novices. She pointed at a sign by the street. After I looked, she dropped her arm frustrated.

 _For Sale._

I released and let the magazine fall out into my hand, turned the safety on, and then reloaded kind of roughly, taking my aggression out in quick actions. After holstering my weapon again, I slammed my heel powerfully into the ground, letting out a frustrated, furious groan through my teeth. Yet again, we'd just had our chains yanked on.

"It's for _sale!"_ I shouted, throwing my head back and yelling at the sky. The patience I'd tried to feel and cultivate less than an hour ago was gone. It was meant to be used so that we could find someone before she died, not so that we could get humiliated by calling a hostage team to an empty house! "No one lives here!"

Booth let out a long-suffering breath and turned back to the car. "Great," he muttered, also upset but better at controlling it. "It's a vacant lot. Wonderful." He suddenly kicked his toes into the floor and made grass and dirt spray up.

Brennan was dismayed as well, but somewhat quelled by us being more upset about it. "I tried to tell you…"

* * *

I was getting really sick of those prison alarms. The buzzers were going to deafen me if I didn't burst my own eardrums first. For just a second, I _almost_ felt bad for Epps, having to hear them all day whenever a door opened. Then I remembered he's an asshole and doesn't deserve sympathy, and those feelings went away.

All three of us went into the visiting room this time, though Epps was, as before, chained down securely by manacles around his hands locked onto a bolted-down piece on the floor under the table. I sat down across from him without wasting time. When we sat around a table, like people who played games, we must've felt more like players than bullies. It grated to have to play to his liking, but if it got the girl home safe…

Booth sat down with us, like last time, but because Epps hadn't bought the stupidity ploy for a second, he thankfully dropped it this time. I was glad I wasn't facing more humiliation. (The HRT guys had given us enough of that.) Brennan had never gotten very close to Epps because he had always bothered her, and none of us particularly wanted to change that. If I were a fantasy, then putting me within reach was tantalizing. If she were a rival, then putting _her_ within reach was dangerous… though I wasn't sure for whom.

When the door closed after the warden, Epps started to smile. I still don't know what it is about his smile. It's not like he'd particularly unattractive, and he doesn't try to mimic some weird demonic image. It's just one of those red flags so subtle they don't even register. I almost felt my skin crawl.

Yet again, he mostly ignored Booth. It didn't surprise me too much. He would screw around with the agent's head happily, but he must have worked out that one of the quickest ways to rile him up is to take away his authority when he feels threatened. By ignoring him, Epps makes him feel like he has less control over what happens, and with people like his partner and his daughter in the room, Booth _hates_ to feel out of control.

"Did you hear?" Epps asked me with sarcastic enthusiasm. "The judge granted our petition for artificial insemination." I very nearly threw up a little in my mouth, but made my guess that the excitement he was mocking was Caroline's. She may have put herself in her position, but I genuinely felt kind of bad for her in that moment. "I'm gonna be a father," he sang, able to see somehow that it was pissing me off. His smile turned from taunting to predatory and he lowered his voice so that the recorders in the room wouldn't pick up on it. "When I make my donation to the baby bank, I'm-"

Before he could finish that sentence, I hooked my ankle around the chain on his manacles and pulled my foot back as hard as I could. Epps had the breath and words stolen from him when his wrists got a very unpleasant exercise and his face landed on the table. This time it seemed like he had at least expected something violent, because he turned his head so that it was his cheek hitting the table instead of his nose. Probably for the best, since his nose had bruising around the bridge.

I didn't want to know how he was going to finish that sentence. I could take a guess that he was going after me again, and I wasn't going to permit him to think that his harassment was okay. I may have no choice but to take it, for Helen's sake, but when he made it sexual, it was _not_ going to fly. He may get a thrill from violating sexual agency, but if he tries to violate mine, I'm going to steal his health. _And that's a promise._

Booth cleared his throat. His jaw was tense and his arms looked a little big in his sleeves like his muscles were all tight. If I hadn't cut off the killer, I had a prediction that things wouldn't have ended prettily. "Who's Reiner Hatin?" He demanded.

Epps shook his head with a condescending roll of his eyes. "Oh, Reiner." He feigned nostalgia and said in a rough, startling voice, "Alter freund mit ähnlichem Geschmack."

I recognized it as German easily enough – or a very similar language – but couldn't actually tell what was being said. One of the words sounded close to an English one, so I jumped on it and pretended I knew the phrase. "Wait, you have friends?" I rudely pretended to be surprised.

"The letters were addressed to a vacant lot." Booth pressed, refusing to give up as easily as he had the last time. He may not _want_ me to run the scene, but unless Brennan stepped in and gave Epps something else entertaining to focus on, he wasn't going to get what he wanted.

"Who were they really for, Howie?" I asked, cocking my head and settling my elbows on the table. My arms were still out of reach of his own – I made sure of that.

Rephrasing Booth's question or not, it apparently made a difference that it came from someone he actually wanted to engage with. Epps looked down at his hands and flexed his long fingers, turning them over to look at his palms. _If you make another remark about jerking off, I'm going to slam your face again,_ I directed at him silently.

"Oh, bother." The silky, completely unbothered tone darkened Booth's scowl. "I must've written the address down wrong." The inmate lamented lamely, slowly lifting his eyes back up and locking them over my shoulder, towards Brennan. "I'm slightly dyslexic, you know," he drawled.

Not only was there nothing else to back it up, but Epps would never admit to a disability if it weren't to prove something. And try as I might, there was no way I could imagine dyslexia being a hint as to where Helen was being held captive.

I could see Booth losing patience, but there wasn't anything I could do about that unless I cut the visit short. We had barely gotten anything out – we had to give Epps the chance to say something, and if he kept just playing cat and mouse, then we'd know he had already said it.

"I don't think that's it at all," I responded, just as lowly and smoothly, calling his bluff fearlessly.

"Hey," Booth said, lifting his hand and crooking his fingers. "Come here." He leaned in over the table. Epps raised his eyebrows and indulged, doing the same thing with the expression of someone watching a not-very-bright pet beg for attention. "You know," Booth started, trying to copy the forced tones and failing. Aggravation seeped through. "I really enjoyed playing your game."

Just as I had done, Booth must have pulled on the manacles with his foot. He did it harder. When Epps went down, the chains themselves rubbed and squeaked, and the echo of his cheek hitting the table echoed for longer. The chain was pulled taut, which I could tell when I looked down under the table and saw Booth keeping his foot back to hold the chain as far as possible.

"Now, you know what?!" He lost his temper and hollered, standing up and leaning onto the table hard with both of his hands pressed down. "There is a missing girl out there somewhere, hanging upside down with duct tape over her mouth!"

"You'd think that by now you'd have gotten bored with being forced to break your face on the table," I flippantly commented to Epps, watching in amusement. Booth's smoldering eyes were an intensity I didn't want directed on me. He may seem like a total dork sometimes, but when he gets mad, the places he's been and the demons he carries really show, and it can make anyone realize they'd gravely underestimated the former ranger.

Epps kept breathing evenly with his face held down. Booth stared down at him hatefully for almost a full minute, and Epps, knowing that he was winning the battle of wills, started to smile again, self-satisfied and full of himself.

Booth saw it in the reflection of the one-way mirror. He stared at the reflection, looking like he was struggling not to do anything more violent. He slowly unwrapped the chain from around his heel and stepped away from the table. Booth was fuming, and I doubted he'd manage to calm down while still looking at Epps. The issue we had, then, was that Epps felt in control, and it made him cocky, which we all knew.

To help the situation, although I knew it must've been a very hard decision for him to make, much less go through with, Booth left the room. Only after he heard the door opening did the serial killer start to lift his head. The chain dragged on the floor until Epps's wrists were far enough from the concrete for him to pick up the slack.

Brennan cleared her throat. She hadn't wanted to speak, which I couldn't blame her for. Every time I spoke, I felt like I'd given Epps something to hold onto, something to use against me. Speaking made us vulnerable in the company of someone who could and would use anything he could glean against us.

"For all of your… faults…" Brennan settled on a somewhat neutral word. It was far more generous than the options I was considering. "Mr. Epps, you were never interested in letting your victims suffer." Brennan came closer to me. Maybe she wanted to try to connect with Epps' humanity, or maybe she didn't want either of us to be so far apart. Epps looked up at her, almost seeming amused that she was trying an appeal to decency. "You didn't torture them. You're not that kind of man." Brennan took out the picture of Helen and her school principal from her pocket and slowly turned it towards him. I didn't stop her because I didn't think it could hurt, but I knew she was about to get a harsh reality check. "She is an innocent child," my mentor softly appealed.

Brennan didn't get what I want, but I didn't get what I expected, either. On some level, I think that Epps actually respected what she had tried to do. Knowing how hard it was to treat him like a person like either of us, she had tried to act as though he held the same capacity of empathy. Whether or not he valued it as a characteristic, it was a very humane thing to do, and probably showed a high level of constraint that no one else – sans for the duped Caroline – ever did.

He didn't go easy or nice, by any means, but if Booth had said it, or if I had (because I'm not that nice), I bet Epps would have seized on it and twisted it around, done something to either make us feel guilty for not finding her or make us feel sick because he's just _that awful_ that he'll happily terrorize and take away the life of a kid.

"She's a young woman," Epps corrected her, looking up through his ragged, uneven bangs at her, calculating and cold but not cruel. "And there's no such thing as an innocent woman."

 _Depends on how you define innocent,_ I countered in my head. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of a real, intellectual discussion on the transition between adolescence and adulthood, much less on how he qualified innocence. Everything Epps said and did had some kind of sexual double meaning (well, almost everything) and innocence in a young woman was especially vulnerable to that kind of interpretation.

"Look within yourself," he implored back at her. "You know I'm right." His cockiness was getting to me, as were his very focused eyes when he looked back at me and intentionally stared straight into mine. "What kind of good girl breaks the wrist of an admirer?" He asked rhetorically, and then clucked his tongue.

I didn't dignify it with an answer. There's a huge difference between a compliment and what Epps had been doing when I broke that wrist for him. That was his entire point – to make us second-guess ourselves, become unsure about our motivations and our moral ground. Spin us around, just like he had before.

Epps leaned back, slumped down lazily in his uncomfortable, hard chair. "I'm just guessing here, understand," he stated idly, looking down at his hands again. "But I think you'll find that Helen Majors has less than twenty-four hours to live."

We hadn't told him her name.

"Better get going," the man sang in a childlike tone, chuckling sardonically after.

I stood up to go, trying not to seem like I was hurrying too much. _He knows her name, he knows her name._ Brennan followed me and as we retreated through the door, Epps' voice raised while he laughed, genuinely amused by his bizarre, repulsive form of entertainment. _He knows her name. Which means in the last three days, he's communicated with his partner._

Which also meant that he had certainly had the opportunity to tell the accomplice to murder Helen before we had the chance to save her.


	20. The Blonde in the Game, Part Four

For many months now, when Brennan had queries about social dilemmas and contradictions, she would ask me. When I came up empty, I usually had my interest piqued. Angela was our go-to because she probably knew more about the topic than both of us combined. If Angela wanted to teach me how to paint my nails, she should probably teach me something I actually cared to know, also, so I figured it was a system that worked out pretty well.

Angela was working in her office, walking around a small pedestal with a raised base to hold the skull of the first victim. She had a few cups of small, cylindrical tissue markers of different lengths and widths that she was using to mark off estimations for a digital reconstruction. I had always been, and probably would always be, impressed that she could make those estimations with a fair degree of accuracy with such limited information – and doubly so when those were made while multitasking.

For all the many, many issues that Epps had, he had consistency on his side in most cases. He had never, as far as we knew, directed his sadism outside of his victimology. Sure, he'd tormented Amy, but that hadn't really been intentional. She'd been a pawn, not someone he particularly cared about hurting until the very end when he could get some cheap amusement. So why was he so focused on Brennan? On me, sure, I could see it – I had been blonde when we met, so for a long time, he'd thought _I_ fit his victim type.

When Brennan posed this question to Angela, the artist looked away from the skull and chuckled incredulously. "What are you asking _me_ for?" She asked, pointing to her chest with one hand and shaking her head.

"You said you've dealt with manipulative men before." Brennan reminded her, pursing her lips. She wasn't super thrilled that Angela's reaction suggested she didn't know, and she really didn't like not knowing answers to things. Her desire to have facts and explanations was what had turned her on to science in the first place.

I frowned at that reasoning while I sat myself down on the dark leather couch and made myself more comfortable. It wasn't like Brennan didn't also have experience with manipulative men. Her ex, Michael, had seemed pretty damn manipulative when we'd met. And David, certainly, had been manipulative; though a very nice guy on the surface, we did a bit of extra digging and found out he was a recruiter for a cult. Not a deathly cult that seemed like they were going to all poison themselves, but a cult, nonetheless. This discovery had been prompted by him making "casual" conversation with me, and me reporting to Brennan when it took a less casual turn.

However, all of that aside, we wanted to understand why Epps thought the way he did. I didn't truly think Angela would be able to fill in the blanks, but asking had been worth a shot. Michael had been an ass and David had been a little brainwash-y, but neither of them were rapists or serial killers. Angela may have dated some trashy guys before, but I doubted she'd accidentally gotten that low, either.

"Sweetie…" Angela's smile came back to her face, a little exasperated but equally fond. "This is a psycho killer." The implication was that the identity of the man in question made it very different.

"Yes," I confirmed. I had not somehow forgotten what Epps had done in the last several hours.

I didn't think the identity of the man should make it very different. Angela may not be able to give exact detail, because the details around Epps' identity were so drastic. But I also don't think anyone is truly particularly unique, and I think that the reasons people think the way they do can be pretty simple. They just manifest themselves differently according to things like experience and comprehension. Zach and Hodgins, for example, think in a lot of the same brain tracks, but they express themselves totally differently.

Angela snorted and gave us a more forced smile, as if to say _sorry, but no_. "My experience is with some loser who wants you to cosign a loan for a jet ski," she stated flatly. "So if a guy you've been on two and a half vaguely disappointing dates with ever asks about your credit history, I'm your girl."

Brennan suddenly groaned in frustration. She threw her head back. It was such an unexpected show that both Angela and I were surprised. The anthropologist put her head down and twisted her corded bracelet while stalking over to take the other end of the couch. Angela walked in a semicircle around the skull's pedestal so she could look at us both while working on the other side of the face.

"Epps is pushing me around, Ange!" Brennan let herself drop onto the couch. I felt a little bounce. "He's in control." She picked at her bracelet for a few seconds, pressing her fingernail between two of the loosely-braided bands, then stopped before she actually damaged it. "… I hate that," she muttered, putting her elbows on her knees.

Epps wasn't _really_ in control, I liked to think. Sure, he wanted to believe he was, but what could he _actually_ do, locked away in his little cage? He said himself that his only real pastime was to do things I really didn't care to imagine. He may have a temporary link to the outside world via his accomplice, but I've watched enough _Criminal Minds_ to understand that now that the second killer is making his own stylistic choices, he won't be happy under Epps' thumb forever. Epps had very little _actual_ power and was instead relying on our morality.

We could very easily take away every scrap of power and control that he had, merely by refusing to play along. We could just decide to tell him to screw himself and then go home early. Brennan could visit Russ, I could marathon Scooby Doo with Parker and Booth. The only problem was that doing that, ceasing the game, would be permitting an innocent girl to suffer and die, as well as assenting to the same being done to who knew how many other potential victims.

Unfortunately for us, our morality was pretty strong. These girls were my age. If I'd been blonde, they could have _been_ me. It was hard to even think about Sarah dying because of Epps' vendetta and _not_ feel guilty. I'd done a lot more in my life that probably lent itself to deserving what she'd gone through than she had. For one, I'd basically told Booth to stall long enough on a report to let Epps die. It wasn't something I was proud of, but it was done, and whether or not I regretted it didn't change that it was something I'd have to hold myself accountable for.

Seeing how badly it was bothering Brennan made Angela sigh and actually think about it. She considered it for several minutes, mulling it over while she worked, adding a few more tissue markers onto the skull.

"You know," she started to say, almost amused, "Epps is acting kind of like a boyfriend."

If there had been any Q-tips around, I may have actually tried to clean out my ears. _Boyfriend?! What?!_ Exactly _how_ did _any_ of Epps' actions translate into any sort of weird romance? The confoundedness must've shown on my face as well as Brennan's.

"Wow," I said, almost speechless. "Okay. I don't – I don't even have a smartass comment on that."

Angela gave a small chuckle at our expressions. I chanced a look over to the side and saw Brennan was toting a suspicious glare as if she doubted Angela wasn't just trying to goad us into a reaction. "You're like an obsession," she explained, turning another marker over between her fingers. "Can't have you, but can't quit you. So he's tormenting you instead. And every time you hurt him, he knows that he's succeeding."

I unwittingly thought back to all the physical violence I'd done to Epps – not to mention all the threats. I'd broken his wrist, possibly his nose, and viscerally enjoyed watching his face get slammed onto a hard metal table. I didn't keep it a secret that his pain pleased me. Earning such a temperamental, strong reaction to anything he did… well, I suppose it was a really strong form of acknowledgment, wasn't it? Not only was it me expressing my negativity as proof that I felt it, but I was giving him even more attention.

"Huh," I murmured, crossing my arms and leaning forward so that I was protectively covering my stomach. "Didn't think of that…" I hated thinking I'd done anything to feed into it, but there was clearly a cycle.

"And Bren," Angela held a hand out towards the scientist. Brennan lifted her eyebrows and raised her head. "You obviously fascinate him. He can't have you, and he can't _kill_ you, so… he wants to make you hate yourself."

All of these connections she was making were sound, but I still wasn't sure how any of it was boyfriend behavior unless she had had some seriously messed up boyfriends. "Exactly how many boyfriends have you had that chose to go down this violent and cruel path?" I demanded cynically, legitimately concerned. "I'm just saying, most people, they break up and they're a little sad, maybe send some angry emails, but they don't usually turn to psychological trauma."

The brunette artist gave me a forcedly pleasant smile. I got the feeling that she was reflecting on some less than happy memories with less than stellar partners. "Let's just keep the focus on Epps right now, okay?" She replied. Strangely enough, she didn't actually answer my question…

"Okay," Brennan accepted compliantly, looking down again.

Angela looked down to her best friend worriedly. "Epps knows that you'll never forgive herself if you don't find Helen Majors before she's murdered." She stated softly. None of us would be okay with not finding the girl, and Epps regrettably understood us better than we understood ourselves in some ways.

Brennan nodded. She didn't even bother trying to pretend that she felt otherwise. "Not only is she being tortured," the woman depressingly brought up, "But her family must be in agony." Having a daughter and a sister out God-knows-where was bad enough. I couldn't imagine how it would have felt to lose Rosemary and Nick if I had had a background of sixteen long years of trust and unconditional support.

"You see?" Angela gently urged. "That's what he's doing. He's putting pictures in your mind, messing with your objectivity." We all knew that her objectivity was a quality that she prided herself on. In her work environment, objectivity was what kept her so effective. If she lost that ability to compartmentalize, then she was much more likely to make a mistake or not be able to handle the death she had to see on a daily basis.

My roommate bobbed her head dully. She recognized and copped to it, but she was lacking conviction and animation. "There's nothing I can do about that," she sighed, feeling helpless and vulnerable. I knew she hated feeling either of those.

"Yes, there is," I contradicted, looking after her like she had asked me to. When she was in too far to see reason, I intervened. I pointed out to her what she was missing. "Step back from the family." In this case, it wasn't what she wasn't seeing – it was what she needed not to see. "Let someone else handle them, Dr. Brennan. You focus on forensics and finding the girl, because that's what you're best at."

Angela gave me a small, proud smile for catching on to what was important and what we could do to help. She sat down on the arm of the couch beside Brennan and put her arm around her best friend's shoulders. "We'll keep Epps from getting a jet ski out of you," she jokingly promised.

* * *

Google Translate wasn't the _best_ source, but it was good enough in a pinch when we didn't need a ton of nuances. I stared at the computer screen like I wanted to intimidate it while Brennan looked over my shoulder and quietly spoke the words out loud in German. Thanks to the audio interpreter that the software offered, she just repeated what Epps had said and we got its English equivalent in the box on the right.

 _What does that even mean?_ I scowled, discouraged. The hints that Epps gave us weren't complicated, as we had already figured out. This one just didn't make any sense. Maybe there was another that we were supposed to have picked up on that we just missed. But when would we have gotten it? Epps had very few opportunities to transmit those hints.

"Caroline Epps?" Booth's loud, annoyed voice startled us both, but not more than he startled himself when he started to set the alarms off on the platform. Brennan winced and covered her ears; Booth said something impolite, swiped his ID card which he first had to get from his wallet, and continued back up onto the platform. "She's not an accomplice," he said, getting back to his original point. "She was at work when Helen Majors was kidnapped."

Since we were sharing how we had all been productive, I turned my eyes back to the computer and judgmentally recited, "Alter friend mit ähnlichem Geschmack."

Booth blinked at me, then decided he wasn't in a mood to deal with it. He waved his left hand at me dismissively like there were just so many things in the world that he could handle at once, and this was not one of those things. "Yeah," he sarcastically agreed, rolling his eyes. "Whatever you say."

"No, it's what _Epps_ said," Brennan corrected. I doubted Booth had forgotten, but it was nice of her to defend me from his irritated snappiness. "It's German for 'old friend with similar tastes.'"

Booth scoffed. "Epps telling us the name of his accomplice?" He shook his head. Reiner Hatin was definitely a Germanic name, which fit in with the hint he'd given in German, but they didn't tie together definitively and I felt sure that there were something we still just didn't quite have yet. "No, that's too easy," Booth shot it down.

"If it's too easy, then why can't we find him?" Brennan smartly argued.

Booth started to hold her eyes in a glare off before he realized he wasn't going to win. He slapped his hands together and bent down slightly to also look at the computer. He didn't see anything particularly interesting, and he stood up again to brainstorm.

"Uh… this time he talked about impregnating Caroline," he suggested. Epps wanted to seem clever at controlling conversation, but really, he just shut his face until he had the opportunity to say what he wanted. What he'd wanted to talk about this time, apparently, was the baby he planned on having and whatever this German message meant.

I wasn't sure if the former was actually something we were supposed to read into, though. Sure, there were ample ways to look between the lines, but was there actually anything between the lines we were meant to find? Maybe he had just said it to bother us. Maybe he'd wanted to make me uncomfortable or to make himself feel superior by getting a rise.

"Ugh," Brennan disgustedly grimaced and wiped her hands down her thighs. "What is _with_ Caroline Epps?" She huffed. "I mean, why have a child with a monster like him? What is she going to tell the child when it grows up? _Hi, your daddy's a monster!_?"

I had never thought about things like that because I never planned on having children, but the thought had crossed my mind, too. She was setting up her own family to be in a _really_ tough place. What if she had a daughter who found out what Epps had done to other families' daughters? How would she ever reconcile her father with the monster? How would she handle knowing that part of her own family had been responsible for so much pain and suffering? Caroline could do whatever she wanted to hurt herself, I didn't even care anymore, but subjecting a child to grow up with that shadow just seemed cruel.

Booth reached a hand for Brennan's shoulder and touched lightly. "Look, look," he said, getting her attention quickly. She avoided his eyes and set her jaw stubbornly. Booth knew she didn't want to listen, but also knew that she would hear him. "You've got to detach from this," he told her, trying to stress the importance. "If we let Epps get under our skin, then he has exactly what he wants!"

"Zach was right," Brennan said, angrily and bitterly. "Epps is trying to break us. Not only did we save his life, but he is _still_ killing." If we weren't careful, we could start blaming ourselves for that.

 _Who am I kidding?_ We already did, to different extents. "I still wish he'd never been taken off of death row," I admitted under my breath, sourly and loathingly.

I hated that there was someone I honestly wished had remained in line for execution. It made me feel like I was less of an empathetic person and maybe like I shouldn't have a job where I investigated murder. Execution, I reminded myself, wasn't the same as murder; execution was sanctioned, and it was usually done to protect people from other, more dangerous people. As a supporter of the death penalty, it was one thing for me to not protest it and another to have been so disappointed not to get to see it played through. I knew the death penalty wasn't my call, and that was how I managed to be okay with it, even confronted with optimistic Amy Morton and all her Innocence Project ideals. When I wished it had been used against Epps, I wondered if that line had somewhere blurred.

When I came out of my thoughts, Hodgins and Zach were both joining us on the platform. Soon we'd have the whole gang together. I hadn't realized I'd been close to zoning out for long enough for them to get so close, but I guess time flies when you're contemplating your moral high ground relative to the various other characters you've met in your quest to make a serial killer pay for his crimes.

"I found traces of ethylene oxide and high levels of an antibacterial agent on Sarah's ankles," Hodgins reported, a pencil stuck behind his ear and poking into his hair. _What,_ I almost questioned out loud, _cigarette burns were okay but letting her get an infection wasn't?_ There was likely a better explanation for the antibacterial. "Also, polymer residue found in polygenic latex glove liners, used by people who handle toxic substances."

Still with almost nothing to go on with the accomplice, that list was a long one. The only ones I could think of even possibly ruling out were select pathologists and perhaps the CDC, because I'd already noticed the second killer didn't have much experience medically.

"Airport screeners," Brennan started suggesting jobs where people might wear those. "Cops-"

"Prison guards!" I yelled quickly, then covered my mouth with a hand. It had come to me as quickly as my brain associated police with criminals. Not only would a prison guard have access to those, but a former prison guard could have had contact with Epps.

Booth nodded at me like he was silently telling me I did a good job. He took out his phone quickly to make a call while Zach stepped forward.

"Lauren Hathaway was a nationally-ranked junior golfer in nineteen ninety-seven," he said, offering a small photograph of a tall, blonde teenager.

"Yeah, it's Booth," the agent said into his cell phone, turning and taking a few steps away. We could still hear him, but the other party couldn't hear us, which allowed us to keep talking. "I need to know if Howard Epps ever had a prison guard by the name of Reiner Hatin."

Trying to follow both conversations, I took my own phone out. Instead of making a call, I opened up an internet browser. Brennan made an invitational gesture at Zach and he took it as a sign to continue. "She disappeared on May ninth two years later after leaving the Southampton Country Club in Raleigh, North Carolina."

"Check to see if any guard changed his name," I heard Booth say, while I turned my phone to show Brennan the screen.

"I Googled it," I stated. "Reiner is German for 'pure.'" The internet said so, according to both Google Translate and a couple of other results that popped up quickly in my search results.

Brennan slowly breathed out. "Epps has a thing about that," she stated knowingly.

"Yeah. I'm guessing that wasn't a coincidence."

"Translate the name and see if that comes back in any form," Booth instructed sternly over the phone, wrapping up his conversation after a longer pause. "Then get back to me." He allowed a very brief opportunity to say something else, but then hung up and came back over. He pointed right at the picture of Lauren. "This the victim from the park?"

Zach nodded. "Her father is in your office," he directed at Brennan.

So quickly after Brennan had already realized she couldn't take on the families, this felt like the universe was trying to throw her off or slap her in the face. I wasn't sure which one it was yet. Brennan looked like she was leaning more towards the slapping option. "What?" She asked, freezing where she had been about to reach for the photograph.

I felt like I needed to protect Brennan from walking into that. Angela and I had just promised her that we would keep that arena from spilling over into her own so that she could keep her wits around her and stop feeling overwhelmed.

"Zach, that's the kind of thing you usually _lead_ with," I stressed at him to make the point explicitly clear.

Zach looked guilty, knowing that he shouldn't have waited so long. "Booth was on the phone…"

Brennan had already turned to the FBI agent. "Booth," she said softly, looking so torn and apologetic that it hurt me. She pushed herself so hard to be able to do everything, and she took it as a personal flaw when there was anything that she couldn't do, or when there was something that she needed to step back from. "I can't do this one," she reluctantly confessed, knowing her own limits.

If I had been in her shoes, I knew I wouldn't want to go through the time-wasting obligations of "are you okay"s and "no problem"s. "I'll go get Angela," I said before Booth could answer, the characteristic, and almost mandatory, concern evident on his face and just about to leave his mouth. "We can do it." I sent Booth a sharp, meaningful stare – Brennan didn't need to be involved on this one. "We've got it. Future reference," I added for Zach, looking back at the intern and struggling not to seem too fed up. "When families of murder victims are around, don't wait for a phone call, okay?"

Zach shuffled his feet, cowed and a little bit embarrassed. "Sorry…" He quietly apologized.

* * *

When Angela and Zach got the results back on Lauren's identity, it turned out that Angela had called her next of kin so that Booth could talk to them, since she knew he was on his way to the lab. Unfortunately, when he actually arrived, he asked Zach where to go and Zach suggested Brennan's office. Angela hadn't known this happened, so that's why there was the confusion.

Grant Hathaway was only forty-seven, but he looked like he felt a lot older than that. His hair was already greying and his clothes, although nice, looked worn and over washed. Instead of laughter lines around his eyes, he had stress lines on his forehead and some around his mouth. He was Lauren's only surviving next of kin.

I had spoken with families before, but I was ill prepared to do it on my own, much less with a family inflicted with Epps and his destruction. Angela came with me and I subtly followed her cues, sitting a few seconds after she did and mimicking her relaxed, open expression with a few modifications. She had papers that she was holding on her lap which I couldn't use as a clutch, or something to do with my hands.

Neither of the two seemed certain of who should start. Angela was compassionate, but to the point that she wanted to give him the opportunity to speak first, and he just didn't even know what to expect. If I were him, I'd have all but given up on ever finding out what had happened to my daughter.

He ran a calloused hand with thick fingers through his thinning hair. "My wife died five years after Lauren disappeared," he said, gesturing beside him to the empty cushion on the loveseat. "I think because she just gave up hope…" He trailed off. "Part of me is glad she's not here today for this."

"We're sorry for your loss, Mr. Hathaway," Angela said. The line was so overused, it could belong in a Wiki-How article on dealing with grief or speaking at funerals. Nevertheless, there wasn't much else that could be said without knowing them more intimately, and Angela seemed to cram enough sincerity in there. "For both of your losses."

I shifted my hips a little bit, moving forward on the sofa and leaning over my lap. "We retrieved all of the reports on your daughter's disappearance," I told him so he would know not to be surprised. "When she first went missing, the police suspected her golf coach?" It had been in Lauren's missing persons file. Fortunately for the coach, the police hadn't been able to prove anything.

"Yes," Grant answered quickly, and grimaced. "He'd… had an affair with one of his students the year before and was on a watch list." Angela and I shot each other a quick, disgusted grimace. Even sexual predators were better than Epps… but probably not by all that much. Just because they were better didn't mean that they were good. The man huffed. "Ironically, his alibi was that he was with another student."

"Wow," Angela commented quietly.

There wasn't really anything I could think of to say to that, except to say that, fantastic, he got off on murder by admitting to being a sex offender. That probably wasn't going to make anyone feel better, but hey, at least he didn't get away with that one. Maybe he shouldn't be coaching. I hope he's not anymore.

I cleared my throat and steered our little meeting in a different direction – towards Epps. "Have you ever heard the name Reiner Hatin?" I asked. Although it wasn't likely, it was possible. Epps had very deliberately chosen to start us off on this round with Lauren's body, and used her corpse as a source of clues, so it would be remiss not to consider that all hints may lead back to her.

Instead of the affirmative answer I hadn't expected but would have liked, the dead girl's father shook his head and took off his glasses. "No, I can't recall ever hearing it." His voice was apologetic.

I looked to Angela and gestured to the folder she had in her lap. "Do you have any currents?" I murmured, indicating that it was time for her to show them to Lauren's dad.

"Yeah, right on top here." Angela pulled out several pieces of paper. One was photograph paper, on which a current photograph of Epps was printed. The others were all taken out of a fairly large sketchbook and had different ideas of what Epps might have looked like almost a decade ago. She turned the pages around to show Grant. "Do you recognize this man?" She asked him patiently.

He had wiped off the lenses of his glasses. Now he put them back on and leaned over to squint at the shot. Epps wasn't looking right at the camera, but off to the side, and somehow he still carried the threat of danger in his posture. I'm sure that Hathaway realized who he might have been, since Epps was wearing a prison jumpsuit.

"No." He answered, disappointed. While he leaned back, he looked up at Angela and switched his eyes between herself and me. "I'm not helping, am I?" He asked, wringing his hands and twisting his watch around on his wrist.

"It's okay," I promised him. "That was a current image." Looks could change a lot.

"Here." Angela shuffled the photograph to the back of the pile and turned it back around. "I made some drawings that show what he might have looked like ten years ago. If you see one that looks familiar, stop me."

Angela turned through a couple of the pages slowly, giving him time to look at them entirely. Angela had pretty much run the gamut on dramatic appearance changes. In one photograph, Epps' lookalike would be smiling; in the next, he'd have a displeased scowl. One gave him a full beard, while another had his head sheared into a buzz cut. The third one had a short moustache, neutral face, and messy, short hair.

"Yes!" Grant said, almost right after Angela put it on the front. He put his hands down on his knees and flexed his hands into fists with nervous energy. "That one. He was a – a greenskeeper or something at the club." The golf club, I assumed, which meant we could maybe pull employment records to double-check. "He helped us load the car one day. I remember because he told Lauren that he looked just like his mother when he was young. It was an odd thing to say…"

I sighed softly and shook my head down to my knees. That would've been when Epps had scouted her out, and it was entirely possible that Lauren was actually his first victim. He had some fixation on his mother, apparently – and especially with killing her and people that reminded him of her.

"I told the police about him when she disappeared," he told us, starting to sound angry. The killer had been someone he had pointed out, and not only was his daughter not rescued, but the killer had walked away. "Why didn't they arrest him?"

"There was no evidence pointing to him," I explained, careful with what I said. I didn't want to give too much away or let him know Epps' name. If he got pissed enough to go _visit_ him in the prison, then everything would be thrown off. "Since then, he's been convicted for several other murders. I know it's not really a consolation, but I assure you, he will _never_ be getting out of prison."

* * *

There was very little that we got out of the Reiner Hatin lead, unfortunately. We had hit a dead end on who Epps' letters were going to, but we knew they _had_ to be getting somewhere. The working theory that Booth and I came up with was that those letters _were_ delivered to the vacant house's mailbox, but it was used as a drop point. They were using the postal service to pass messages without revealing the accomplice's whereabouts.

Booth was still getting a gut feeling about Caroline, so he sent Angela to the Royal Diner with Epps' wife. He thought a woman might have more success talking to her, and Brennan and I had already made our stances loud and clear. Angela's softer personality and tactful approach to problems made her an ideal candidate for something like this. She spent almost an hour at the diner before she called Booth with a name – Caroline admitted to having once delivered a cryptic message after Epps asked.

The new address was pulled from the FBI and thankfully, while the house was trashy and uncared for, it was definitely inhabited. To take them by surprise, Booth didn't knock or ring the bell. He did a silent countdown on his fingers with his gun out, but the safety still on. I took mine out of its holster but didn't plan on shooting anyone, and Brennan, sulking about being the only one without a sidearm, hovered behind me while we waited for Booth to kick in the door.

He reached one and slammed his heel into the door so hard that it ripped the hinge right out of the door frame. "FBI!" He bellowed to make sure everyone heard. "Hands in the air!"

With the door opened, we could smell a kind of gross scent like warmed lunch meat coming from one direction. I glanced into the kitchen, saw no one, and advanced with Brennan behind me. Booth barreled straight down the front hall and came out in a living room. There were flickering lights and tinny, poor quality sound coming from a cheap speaker set connected to a TV so old that it still had antennae.

There was someone's head sticking up from the other side of the couch, facing the TV. I scrunched up my face, trying not to smell the mildew of a poorly-cared for home, and lowered my gun. Booth had his trained on the guy, who was still sitting down, so he wasn't much of a threat. He was almost bald, had on a stained white shirt with ripped sleeves, and short, meaty arms, which were lifted over his head.

I looked at the TV. If I hadn't already been making a face of disgust, I would have started doing that. "Is that Casa Erotica?" I asked in distaste. There was a naked man, a woman with her skirt missing and her stockings torn, and cheesy dialogue in subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

Booth looked chagrined as soon as I pointed it out. "Ignore the porn, kid," he commanded, and purely for that, I almost wanted to watch. _Almost._ Not quite. "Move over there, slowly," he ordered, moving the barrel of his gun to point at the side of the couch. The man on the couch started to put his hands down slowly, and Booth barked, "Keep your hands where I can see them!"

The man huffed. He was less shocked now and just annoyed that we'd broken in while he was trying to enjoy his lame pornos. "I can't do both!" He said snidely.

I walked around the other side of the couch and my foot dipped a little at a soft spot on the floor. I quickly hopped off of that part and circled the old sofa, which smelled like mildew and dust. It had seemed like he was just sitting on the couch, but that was wrong; he was in a wheelchair which was positioned right in front of the furniture.

"He really can't," I informed Booth, gesturing with my hand for him to lower his gun. There was no point in being all threatening towards someone who couldn't suddenly moving anywhere, and who had no weapons in arm's reach – unless I counted the empty beer bottle.

"Easy," Booth growled, slowly circling around. Brennan followed after him, casted the TV an unimpressed look, and focused on its viewer. Booth saw the wheelchair and groaned. "Oh, jeez." He holstered his weapon. "Where's Henry Gerber?"

I looked back at the TV when I heard a particularly stupid phrase. _Yeah, definitely an old one,_ I remarked in my head, _Because no one today would think that's hot._

" _I'm_ Henry Gerber," the balding man in the wheelchair glowered.

"No way," I scoffed indignantly, taking a step back and staring at the TV set with morbid curiosity. The actors on the screen had just done a thing that did _not_ look pleasurable. If they stayed like that, he was going to run out of energy or pull a muscle, and she probably wouldn't feel too great, either. "Is that actually a thing? That looks _really_ uncomfortable."

Booth dropped his jaw and shook his head at me emphatically. He waved his hand at me rudely to get my attention again. "Hey, stop watching the porn!" He scolded, exasperated.

* * *

We talked about it for a while and threw ideas around, but even though we had brought Gerber in for questioning, we all knew that he wasn't the accomplice. He legitimately couldn't use his legs, and all medical records showed it was no recent injury. Helen had been - _was¸_ I corrected myself – on the track team, and Sarah had played tennis and volleyball after school. There was no way he could restrain them. While it was technically possible he was somehow involved, if Epps had chosen him to use, then he was taking more risks than necessary by bringing in so many uncontrolled variables.

"There is no way that a man in a wheelchair could have killed Sarah Koskoff, _or_ swapped hamate bones with Lauren Hathaway." Brennan was so frustrated with the false lead that I think she could have screamed. While I wasn't so sure that he couldn't somehow swap the bones, I did agree that he wouldn't have been able to torture Sarah.

"Alright." Booth clapped sarcastically and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, seriously pissed off. This wasn't the first dead end we'd found with clues that had seemed real. Last time, the fight for evidence had been over what was admissible or not, and there was so much doubt over who was really guilty. Now, Epps was throwing us so many bones that we didn't know which ones to chase. "So Epps got us again, huh?" He sounded deprecating. "Gerber's paralyzed from the waist down because Epps knifed him just before he was paroled."

"So, what?" Hodgins snorted and turned his hands over, palms open, hunched over in the swiveling chair beside the exam table. "His message, _don't you miss them_ , meant… his legs?"

 _That's just sad, even for Epps,_ I thought, rolling my eyes. When Caroline had repeated the message to Angela, the artist had been unsure what to think. Me and my dark brain had gone down the road of thinking "them" might have meant murders, or terrified young victims. Apparently it was neither, and Epps was just a petty asshole.

Zach laughed, surprising all of us with the sudden giggle. "Epps is good," he decided, amused, still looking at whatever he was doing on the computer.

All of us – every single one of us conversing on the platform, that is – turned and stared at him. Brennan obviously realized that Zach wasn't actually praising the killer for his morals, but Booth just seemed like he was two seconds from reaching out and wrapping his hands around the lanky intern's throat. Hodgins hid his face in his hands. I crossed my arms and stared at Zach so hard that it made him realize he'd said something wrong. The uncomfortable, slightly pissed silence might have helped, too.

He backtracked, realized what he'd said, and amended. "Not morally, of course," he corrected, wincing. "But it's a classic feint-and-parry misdirect, delivered via his _wife_." He was impressed by something about that. Maybe it was just because Zach had no problems acknowledging the intelligence of the team – particularly of himself, Hodgins, and Brennan – and yet Epps kept making us run into walls like headless chickens.

Booth put his fists on his hips and turned his head so far towards his shoulder that I heard his neck pop. "He gets off on screwing with peoples' lives," he snapped at Zach harshly. He was taking it as a personal insult that Zach had anything good to say about the serial killer.

The grad student looked so embarrassed that he had to be reminded that I almost wanted to swat Booth for it. Zach knew murder was bad and he knew Epps was bad, and he knew that the goal was to stop the opponent. Just because you acknowledge and maybe look up to someone's intellect doesn't mean you aspire to be them or deem them a good person, and I know that, and he knows that, and so he shouldn't have been so harsh. For supposedly being the one with the most social graces, Booth lacks a lot of them when it comes to Zach. I don't know if it's because he doesn't understand the younger man or if it's because he just doesn't like him, but either way, it's unappreciated on a good day and downright rude when we're all having a tough week.

To take the heat away from my friend, I shot a quick look at Booth to judge his temper and then sighed loudly. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I complained, "Why can't he just be a normal person and get off on screwing with people, period?"

Hodgins snorted. At least part of my idea had worked. "Because he's _insane,"_ the chemist told me off, but there wasn't any actual irritation or sourness behind it like there had been in Booth's rebuke.

Brennan, fed up with all the irrelevance and poor humor, rolled her wrist and indicated for us to go forward. "Where are we on Reiner Hatin?" She asked anyone who would give an answer.

"He's no one," Booth sighed, slapping his hand down on his thigh. "You know, Epps, he must've just made it up. The only way he even exists is a record of a name and a fake address scrawled on a dirty piece of stationary."

Zach raised his hand. The motion was tentative, but his speech wasn't. "I had some thoughts," he said by way of transition. "Perhaps the point isn't that German is a different language, but that it's _actually_ a different language!"

Well, that made no sense whatsoever to me, but Brennan seemed to have a bell rung in her head.

"Great," Booth sarcastically celebrated. "Thanks, Zach, for being so _helpful._ "

Brennan lightly smacked his chest with the back of her hand. Booth pretended it hurt and rubbed the front of his shirt. "Go on," she told her student curiously.

Zach fumbled with figuring out what he wanted to say, sending a look at Booth somewhere between nervousness and guilt. He wanted so badly to get along with Booth that I wished I could do something to bridge the gap between the two, but Booth wasn't really receptive to any attempts. He didn't hate Zach, he just didn't feel much for him, other than the same sense of protectiveness and mutual friendship that stemmed from the close nature of the team's working relationship.

"More broadly speaking, I mean," Zach tried to explain, rotating his chair so his legs were under the desk again. "Like an anagram or an inner or secret language." He drew up a word processor on the monitor and I, being the closest to him, put a hand on the edge of the desk and leaned in by his side. "These are phrases I found in English. Perhaps in German-"

"The German was a misdirect," I interrupted him, albeit as gently as it was possible to interrupt someone. "If it's going to be anywhere, it'll be right here."

The phrases Zach had come up with were all different configurations of the letters in the fake name, scrambled together. Some of them produced actual words. It looked like Zach had rearranged them in every order he could put together, which I wouldn't put past his quick and analytical mind, but then deleted the ones that were impossible to pronounce or otherwise made absolutely no sense. There were only four left, and none of the phrases themselves had any actual meaning to me.

Hodgins, Booth, and Brennan all crowded around, too. I put a hand lightly on the back of Zach's chair, not touching him, to secure my place by the computer. Hodgins did the same on Zach's other side, teaming us up like the Terrible Trio again (thanks for the moniker, Cam) and squinting at the options. Hodgins, whenever presented with a code, liked to brag about his cipher-cracking relative, so I was a little surprised he didn't automatically start telling us about how awesome his family was.

"Rant herein I…" Hodgins skeptically shrugged his shoulders, trying to force himself to think of something. "Like… schizophrenic voices?"

The expression I made to that was iffy. Other than his psychopathy, Epps was mentally sound. If it alluded to the accomplice, why the hell would Epps jeopardize his own chess game that drastically by trusting key pieces in the hands of someone who was so much more likely to go off track?

"Are inner hit could mean…" Zach sounded clueless even as he started, making it clear that he had no idea what he was doing. After we all gave him a few seconds for a fair try, he uneasily mumbled, "I don't really do the poetry thing."

If I were a little touchier, I'd have patted his shoulder reassuringly. It was fine, none of us were particularly poetic. That was a big problem, though – poetry didn't have strict rules about meaning, or narrow interpretations. If it followed rules like those, Zach could excel. I realized that even Hodgins' analysis was too broad and didn't have much relevance. "No, wait, Epps isn't sophisticated in his clues, why should this be so much more complex than anything else?" Trying to make things into metaphors or creative interpretations wasn't gonna do jack for us. "Whatever he wants to say, it's right here on this page."

Booth looked past the top two because they didn't make sense, grammatically or contextually. One of the options several down made him furrow his eyebrows. "Neither rain…" he read, putting a hand heavily on the back of the chair. Poor Zach was just surrounded. "Neither rain," he repeated, eyes widening as he remembered why it struck a chord. "Neither rain, nor sleet, nor dead of night!"

"The postal service motto!" Brennan exclaimed, recognizing it as soon as her partner recited it.

Hodgins gestured to the computer and looked up over his shoulder at the agent. "Hey, the guy's all about sending messages," he agreed amicably. It made as much sense as anything, and at least it _made sense._

"And homicide," I inputted importantly. I mean, I got what Hodgins was getting at, but homicide definitely seemed important to keep in mind, too.

The agent snapped his fingers rapidly while he kept thinking of how the postal service fit into the case. Not only did it make sense in the way that Epps' clues always worked, but it actually followed a subtle theme that had slipped into the investigation. "Mail to an empty lot, messages dropped in mail slots…"

"Postal workers wear polygenic gloves!" Hodgins thought of brightly.

Brennan piped up again after thinking intently about something. Her expression had gotten more solemn after Booth had referred again to the red herring's address. "Then who received the letters Epps sent to that empty lot?"

* * *

When it came down to it, we knew that there was some means of communication we were missing. Epps may have faked the identity of his correspondent, but we knew for a fact that letters had left the prison from him. Being almost certain that the postal service was involved somehow, it was only a logical conclusion that they took advantage of the system to hide how they were in touch.

Angela got on a webcam call with the manager of the postal service station responsible for handling this part of the state. He was a younger looking guy than I expected, but he made up for it by looking and sounding extra grumpy. Even though he wasn't a ray of sunshine, he was very cooperative and didn't ask too many questions about being on the line with an FBI agent and an array of consultants.

After Brennan asked where something sent to an abandoned property would go, the thirty-something-year-old's frown turned more confused than bothered, but he answered anyway without hesitation. _"Letters with an invalid address and no return address go to the dead letter office. Parcels are opened to see what's inside, letters are sometimes read, we see if we can figure out where they were supposed to go."_

"And if you can't?" I asked carefully, rocking on the balls of my feet.

The man in the webcam shrugged. _"Unfortunately, there's nothing else we_ _ **can**_ _do. We don't got the psychic powers we need to keep them going. Correspondences are usually destroyed. Shipments get auctioned off if we can't match any ID numbers."_

"Destroyed," I repeated meaningfully, looking over my shoulder at Booth. That would be a pretty good way to cover up tracks – legally and totally normally destroy the evidence of any communication with a formerly-death row prisoner.

"Who had access?" Brennan asked, coming across a little demanding.

 _"_ _The sorting staff, mainly. The mail carrier for the route has a key to drop off the new duds."_

I started to point at the computer monitor underneath the one we were using for the webcam call. Angela had almost half a dozen monitors in her office, and the one mounted up higher was primarily used for video calls. Then I remembered that he couldn't see what I was pointing at, so it was moot. "Can you illustrate the mail route that includes 7408 Haskell Street?"

 _"_ _Well,"_ the man huffed impatiently. _"There_ _ **is**_ _no 7408 Haskell."_ As we had all already established when setting up the discussion. I barely kept from rolling my eyes. He leaned forward and looked away from his camera, setting up his computer and sending a map to Angela. _"But there is a route that happens to run by it."_

It loaded for Angela just a few seconds after the manager leaned back away from the keyboard. Angela used her handheld tablet to pull the map up on the larger screen and zoomed in on a red path that highlighted certain streets. She confirmed for the helpful, if disgruntled, employee that she had gotten it electronically.

Booth stepped forward to look at the street names and double-check what he was seeing. "Hey," he called abruptly, pointing to the corner of a block where both of the intersecting streets were colored in with red. "That's Caroline Epps' beauty salon."

Brennan pointed, also, but didn't need to get as close to the computer to do it. "That's St. Agnes High School, up there on the right." The postal route ran just to the left side of the school and touched its border.

Angela raised her eyebrows, incredulous. "The killer picked his victims from a _postal route_."

"I guess you could say he's… _gone postal."_ I regretted the joke as soon as I said it. The manager loudly sighed as if he'd heard it a thousand times before.

"No. Holly, just… no," Booth dissuaded, giving me one of the most disappointed looks I'd ever gotten from him.

Pretending not to have lowered myself to such a poor attempt at humor, I coughed into my elbow. "We need the name of the mail carrier for that route," I told the manager, looking up to the webcam and salvaging whatever dignity I could still be viewed with.

The cranky one went toward the computer to do the same thing as before and send info to Angela. _"I can do you one better. All I ask is that when this goes to the press, nobody uses the word 'disgruntled.'"_

On top of the map of the route, Angela opened an employee file. This one was more like the shape of paper and didn't fill the entire screen, and the first page of the PDF was an ID photo on a dark background. The ginger man stared back out lifelessly, like most people getting their IDs taken, and _Gil Lappin_ was written in all caps as the caption on a strip at the very bottom.

"Booth!" Brennan recognized the face as soon as she saw it.

So did Booth. He took out his phone and flipped it open while staring darkly at the screen. "Yeah," he assured, voice tense. "I see that."

"What?" Angela worried, twisting to look at them both in turn.

Brennan pointed to the picture and then dropped her arm. "That's the guy who found the first body." She stated, disgusted and upset. We had been in the same space as the accomplice, and instead of taking him in, we had let him go. If we had paid more attention, asked more questions, Helen would be safe at home right now.

"Found?" I repeated after her, questioning the word choice with a scoff. "He didn't _find_ it. He _led us_ to it because Epps told him exactly where it was."


End file.
